Edge Delivery¶

What is Edge Delivery¶

Edge Delivery is a new service by System73 which is based on the Content Steering technology. The latter represents a technique that allows content providers to dynamically route users to the best-performing CDN for their location. This is done by using the real-time data to measure the performance of each CDN and then routing users to the CDN that is performing the best. The main intention of this service is to provide a set of tools to collect data from the players and report to the players a sorted list of CDNs based on the configuration the client offers.

Info

Edge Delivery supports both HLS and Dash specifications of Content Steering.¶

Dash Specification: Dash Content Steering

HLS Specification: HLS Content Steering

How does Edge Delivery work within ESP?¶

First, the player requests a content steering server, and based on the performance metrics of the various CDNs, the server sends a sorted list of CDNs based on the configuration that the client provides. The player can also be set where to go by default, meaning that it always has the decision about which CDN to go to, and it always uses the ContentSteering server to make the decision.

The Sequence Diagram

Why choose Edge Delivery?¶

Having a multi-CDN or a DNS-based multi-CDN approach has some drawbacks compared to Content Steering.

The first (multi-CDN) approach can be complex to manage, as well as it can result in increased costs, while also introducing potential integration challenges, inconsistent performance across CDNs, and capacity/geographical limitations. The drawbacks of the second one (DNS-based multi-CDN) include limited real-time performance optimization as the player does not report any RUM, delayed routing updates, and longer propagation times for DNS changes. Moreover, it creates a strong dependency on DNS servers and increases infrastructure costs as the servers should be replicated worldwide to reduce the RTT.

Here’s where the Content Steering server helps us to improve problems mentioned above. Due to the fact that all the players are connected to the server, the responsiveness is very high when the configuration or metrics are changed.

This section was last updated 2024-01-24