Addressing the Challenge of High-Traffic Video Streaming

Streaming video has long been the venue of third-party commercial content delivery networks (CDNs). However, when a streaming service starts generating a lot of traffic, even a robust CDN can’t stop dreaded buffering or slow video startup times.

When a large CDN serves multitudes of content providers, all the segments required to offer a full video will never get into the cache. Flawless streaming video requires state-of-the-art content delivery. As Netflix and others have discovered, the best, most cost-effective path to high-performance video service is with a network of private hosting solutions and clouds that essentially act like a private CDN.

Until recently, this solution would have been too complicated, begging for outsourcing to a commercial CDN. New software packages, open source solutions and newer services make it possible to assemble a private CDN solution with off-the-shelf products. In this paper, we explore why a private CDN is an effective approach and how to build one.

We will show how to build one using a specific set of technology choices. With regard to the choices made in this paper: There are a lot of alternatives out there. We will try to indicate alternative solutions that could have been deployed along the way.

In this paper, we explore why a private CDN is an effective approach and how to build one.