Evaluating Peer-to-Peer Solutions for Your Online Business
Finally, usable clients must operate in any network environment, including those home networks behind network address transition (NAT) devices and firewalls. Personal firewalls should not block P2P traffic (or flag it as suspicious) and the P2P solution must traverse NAT devices effectively, given the pervasiveness of shared wireless home routers running NAT.
CDN Integration Questions
When evaluating a hybrid CDN solution, one key consideration is the underlying CDN architecture itself. Of particular importance here is the trend towards multiple CDN sources for content publishers. As the sophistication of providers has grown, many are using their own origin infrastructure to fill in the troughs and use a third-party CDN solely for peak management. Others are leveraging multiple CDNs to ensure minimally a dual vendor strategy, but also leveraging the best CDN for the various geographies they serve.
Most hybrid solutions fall into one of two categories; a dedicated CDN solution and a CDN-neutral solution. In the dedicated model, the peer-assisted network is vertically integrated with specific CDN infrastructure. The combined offering looks very much like a stand-alone CDN vendor and is often managed as such by the customer. When evaluating solutions of this nature, it’s important to evaluate the infrastructure elements as you would any traditional CDN in terms of scale, geographic reach, and capacity.
CDN-neutral solutions are designed to work with any third-party CDN that supports HTTP 1.1. This allows peer acceleration to leverage multiple CDNs concurrently and to accelerate several networks at once. This flexibility affords the customer the opportunity to bring a best of breed solution to bear, with best in class CDNs alongside best in class peer technologies. However, with so many CDNs in the marketplace today (dozens by some estimates), you will want to carefully evaluate if the solution has referenced working implementations with your vendor of choice or set aside additional time for testing.
As with any CDN, good reporting is key to getting the best performance out of your vendor and the most for your money. Peer-based systems have a unique advantage here, given the ability to measure the exact performance delivered to the end user at the client and, in the CDN-neutral solutions, the ability to present an unbiased view of the underlying CDN infrastructure as well.
But at the end of the day, it’s about performance. The ultimate questions focus on how much offload (expect good numbers), or how much more reliable and/or faster is the download. In other words, can this technology deliver the high quality content your users demand?
Summary
There’s no doubt that with the growth of entertainment online from movies, TV shows, music, games and software, the surge of rich content on the internet will continue. In order to ensure a reliable user experience and a cost-effective content delivery method for content publishers, it’s critical to ascertain which content delivery approach is best suited to your needs. And when considering P2P and the wide range of solutions available (not all created equal), it’s important to evaluate which solution is right for your applications and how best to integrate this solution with the traditional content delivery architectures you already have.