March 28, 2023 • 51 mins
Content is everywhere in today's world! It doesn't magically just show up on your favorite streaming device, it's pumped through something called Content Delivery Networks or CDNs. This week Alex gives us a glimpse of what a CDN is, its purpose, and how our favorite shows get in the palm of our hands!
Like us? Give us a review on Podchaser or Apple Podcasts to let us know!
Follow Breaking Down the Bytes!
Linkedin | Twitter | Facebook | Discord
Want to give feedback? Fill out our survey
Email us! - breakingbytespod@gmail.com
Follow Pat and Kyle!
Twitter:
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Pat (00:01):
Hey everybody.
Welcome back to this week'sedition of Breaking Down the
Bites.
As usual, I'm your host, pat.
You can find me on Twitter atlayer eight packet.
That's the number eight.
Kyle's here too.
He's on Twitter as well at Dan 256.
You can find the show on Twitterat breaking bites.
Pod we're pretty active onTwitter, so come say hello.
(00:22):
If you like the show, don'tforget to subscribe to your
streaming platform of choice.
We are back for another week.
The three amigos are here, readyto roll, ready to get pretty
nerdy.
Is this topic, this week's topicis gonna be awesome in my
opinion.
So, what's up Kyle?
What's going on man?
Kyle (00:39):
Super excited.
This is gonna be great.
Another, another wonderful.
Pennsylvania Day.
There's the weather for you,
Pat (00:44):
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
I was looking forward to that.
I really was.
It was cold today, man.
It really was,
Kyle (00:52):
Yeah, it's gross.
Pat (00:53):
out there.
I went to St.
Patty State Parade.
for those of you that know, knowme or just know me virtually,
my, my Pops has been playing thebag prize for like 20 years and
he actually started when we werein college, Kyle.
It was, it was funny.
They, they ushered in a newpresident at the college we were
at and they actually hired apiper to play like the ceremony
(01:14):
or whatever.
And my dad thought that waspretty cool.
And he picked up pipes and he'sbeen playing ever since.
So he is going on 20 years ofplaying, playing the old pipes,
which only has eight notes bythe way.
For those of you that arewilling for a fun fact that the
bagpipes only have eight notes.
So anyway, so yeah, we went tosee him today, play, St.
Patty's Day parade, and we tookthe grandkids and it was really
(01:35):
cold out there, but, but we didit and we made it so it was all
good.
But it was, it was pretty wick.
It was like f like 15 with thewindchill.
It was pretty crazy.
So not a good time.
Alex.
You have warmer weather whereyou're at, out there, you don't
get, you don't get very cold.
cold.
nights out there, eh,
Alex (01:56):
Nah, it's gonna be, there's gonna be a few days in
the low sixties this week.
Spa colds gets
Pat (02:03):
River
Kyle (02:04):
Sounds terrible.
Pat (02:06):
This is awful.
no.
So we are back this week.
We appreciate everybody joiningas usual.
Just a couple of housekeepingitems before we get into the
nerdy stuff.
Last week I talked about theCisco Champions Radio podcast
that was released, or that Ishould say that I did, with them
on the Catalyst 95.
X series, that was actuallyreleased last week.
(02:27):
So they were much quicker than Ithought they would be with the
release of that episode,depending on where, that one
fell in the schedule.
So, that is out there now.
Go check that out.
Cisco Champions Radio, 9,500 x.
also a link.
To the podcast will be in theshow notes for this week.
So, to make it easy for y'all tofind it and, go from there.
So that's, one item.
The next item is, we didn'trealize it at the time, but last
(02:50):
week was our 50th episode, theBig Five.
Oh gentlemen.
That was, that's some sort of amini milestone, I think.
Wouldn't you say?
Alex (02:59):
right.
I wish I had like one of thoseparty blows.
Yeah.
Pat (03:05):
we need, we need sound effects on this show.
Maybe that's in the next budget.
I don't know.
We'll see.
Alex (03:09):
Mm-hmm.
Kyle (03:10):
you go.
Pat (03:10):
Yeah, so the big 50.
So thanks everybody for tuningin with us.
So everyone that's made thisshow possible guests.
Listeners, you guys as co-hosts,my man Dean who originally
started it with me, so, he's abig part of this as well, even
though he's not with us anymore.
So just a big thanks toeverybody.
We made to, we made it to 50, sowe're gonna keep going until
people tell us to stop.
(03:32):
So, they're like, oh my God, wewish those guys would just shut
up already.
If that happens, just, justtweet at us and tell us the,
the, the no, no hard feelings.
Last one for us is I, I attendeda event last week with our good
friend Nikki Townson, who shewas on the show, a while back.
She has a nonprofit called TechAware, which basically, helps
(03:53):
women.
Get into the tech fields, orbusiness in general.
So she does a lot of things withlike LinkedIn headshots and
resume, pointers and basicallyjust exposing women and
connecting women to all these,bunch of places and sponsors
and, things of that nature.
she had their, tech wear hadtheir big.
Event last week at the Microsoftcampus in Malvern, Pennsylvania.
(04:15):
So, I literally, one of ouroffices is right up the road,
literally less than two miles.
So I worked down there for todayand, shot down the road and, and
went to support her.
And let me tell you, it was.
Packed.
It was just people everywhere.
And, so she's doing really bigthings over there.
Her and her team over at TechAware.
So Go Tech, go check them out.
Their link will be in the shownotes there as well.
(04:37):
I think it's techaware.tech istheir website.
So if you're a, a woman outthere looking to make
connections with our other,Women in business and trying to
get into tech.
Certainly check them out andthey have a whole bunch of
resources there.
So shout out to Nikki and hercrew for putting on that, that
event.
That was some, that was really,really something to see.
So, just a couple of notes therefor this week.
(04:58):
House cleaning before we getonto the nerdy stuff.
So, and now the nerdy stuff,ladies and gents, here we go.
We need a soundboard.
A sound transition would've beengood right there, but we
digress.
This week we are doing a c d NDeep Dive Content delivery
(05:19):
networks.
So, Alex, you are gonna drivethis one, or I should say the
majority of it.
We're gonna pop in questions andhave a decent discussion on
where we fall short.
We, as in Kyle and I fall shortwith the cdn, technologies and,
and whatnot.
Yeah, cdn, this week's gonna bea really good one.
See if we can kind of get goingand if anybody sees any smoke
(05:40):
out their window, that's, that'sthis podcast thinking and
collectively coming together andtrying to make a mess of this.
So we'll see what happens.
So, Alex, you wanna take itaway, my friend, and go from
there.
Alex (05:51):
Sure thing.
So yeah, there's another onethat we talked about for a bit,
and now that I have a fewmonths, well actually it's
almost a year at this point, atDisney streaming, I have some
insider info.
And even though I felt like Iknew the technology pretty well
before, I certainly feel like Iknow it pretty well now.
(06:12):
So just like last time, it'ssimilar to the Azure.
Podcast that we had a little bitago.
It'll be a deep dive.
Probably won't be quite astechnical as yours was but we'll
see how it goes.
First thing I wanted to do wasjust high level overview of what
CDN someone is listening tothis, I would imagine you have a
little bit of background maybe,maybe not So just like it sounds
(06:33):
CDN Content Delivery Network,it's a whole idea is it's a
network and it's and onlypurpose is delivering content.
To the end user, which seemspretty straightforward, but I
mean, ultimately that that'swhat it is.
And I mean, it can't beanything.
It could be, it could be apodcast if it really wanted to.
(06:55):
It could be just a web servertraffic.
But I think we're gonna focus onvideo streaming cuz don't have
the stats to back it up, But I'mgonna assume that 90% of the
traffic Traversing CDNs isrelated to it the sudden just
massive increase in thestreaming players out there.
(07:16):
I mean, what started as beinglike a a Netflix thing is now,
at this point, I'm kind ofshocked if some random network
doesn't have their own streamingvariant, whether it be,
discovery Paramount, cvs, youname it, they all have one now.
But obviously there's somegiants in the room.
Netflix, Certainly Hulu andDisney, which is what I'm
(07:40):
familiar with.
And then some other big playerslike Apple.
So yeah, like I said, we'llfocus on CDNs as it relates to
transition into talking aboutstreaming and not related to
cdn, but starting with that withCDNs and we'll, we'll just use
Disney here.
(08:01):
The concept of a cdm right nowis there's so much storage
that's involved with storing allthis stuff So, I mean, you think
about Netflix and Disney'scatalog of content, it it's
enormous.
I mean the, the terabytes andwhatever comes out, the
petabytes, of storage neededfor,
Pat (08:19):
Yeah.
Alex (08:21):
right.
And the whole idea is there'sall this content you want to get
it to people across the.
and you wanna be for performancereasons.
You wanna be as close to thoseend people, end users as you
can.
But it, it's not realistic totake all that massive amount of
storage and put it 60 places inthe world.
It's just doesn't make financialsense.
(08:43):
But it also doesn't make sensethat you have everyone in the
world trying to watch strangerthings and maybe there's just
one server in, Las Vegas.
Los Angeles that serves thatcontent for the rest of the
world.
So that's kind of where CDNscome right in.
It's getting as close to the pas possible as you can to the
end user at a price that makessense.
(09:07):
And the way they do that is kindof how you architect CDNs.
You have the concept of anorigin site.
that's going to have all thestorage.
It, it's gonna every singlecatalog, every, everything from
the newest episode of StrangerThings to, I don't know, some
off the wall, like whatever youcan think of is.
(09:27):
Use your imagination.
Whatever you may think of that'snot popular.
All that's stored in theseorange origin sites and without.
Going into too much detail andsaying anything that I'm not
allowed to say about Disney, it,it's universal.
Across all these streaminggiants, they're going to have
probably less than five of thesein the whole world less than 10
certainly.
(09:47):
And I think Netflix has three.
That's public knowledge.
So the idea is all their data.
You need redundancy.
You can't have a a site gooffline.
You lose some content, but youdon't need many.
So we'll just assume five or andthe other thing worth noting is
that storage, there's not allstorage is treated the same.
You have storage that's betterused for writing and deleting or
(10:13):
racing content and putting newcontent really quick.
and, dynamic content, content isgonna be there one day, gone the
next, or maybe even here, onehour gone the next hour.
Then you have storage that isn'tas good with that.
It's, it's meant to store it andstay there and you can get to
it, but it's a little slower,but you can hold more so that
(10:35):
you can think of your originsite as that's gonna be the
massive amounts of storage asfar as like just size.
but that's going to be the IO oras fast as it can read and write
is gonna be much slower thanwhat you're gonna have at the
Edge sites.
Where the edge sites are gonnabe the exact opposite.
You're gonna have much lessstorage, but they can pull and
(10:58):
retrieve content and sendcontent much faster than other
storage.
And those are the two extremes.
The very edge site where this iswhere actually the users are
getting content and the originsite.
all the content lives.
I think Netflix does the exactsame thing in most streaming
providers.
It's also sometimes a, middlemanas well.
(11:19):
So you might have the concept ofan origin site that might only
be, two continents in the world,two, three places in the world.
You might have something like amid-tier or mid site data
center, and that might hold,say, 50% of the content.
And then you'll have edge siteswith that might legitimately
(11:41):
only hold 5% of all the entirecatalog.
But the thing that that makesthat work is that 5% of the
content which can be stored onthese edge caching nodes cdn,
that might legitimatelyconstitute 95% of all the
(12:01):
traffic.
Pat (12:02):
Wow.
Alex (12:02):
Like you get the, the, the Netflix top 10 sites or top 10
shows, top 10 movies.
Pat (12:08):
Yep.
Alex (12:09):
And even extrapolate that back cuz there's so much
content.
Let's say the top 50, you takethe top 50, that might only be
5% of the, of their entirecatalog cuz they have thousands
of things on their catalog.
Pat (12:21):
Right, right.
Alex (12:22):
But you take those top 50 and you put'em on the caching
node.
And that might, like I said,service 95% of all the.
So you need to be able to accesscontent when you need to.
But the fact is, is that thesecashing nodes with a very
limited amount of storage andcan write data and delete data
(12:43):
very quickly.
They're kind of like constantlyout there with just the the most
popular content.
ultimately that's how they getaway with.
Lot more sites, they can getclose to the customers because
they just don't need datacenters full of storage.
You can have a few devices.
(13:03):
And I think what some peopledon't realize is an origin site,
which I said has all the contentthat might be an entire data
center, floors full of equipmentwhere.
An Edge site, they might justany of these streaming
providers, they might just gointo a data center provider and
say, I need two racks and just,you can put it anywhere.
So your cost to entry so quick,just turning up.
(13:26):
You can do these so quickly cuzyou're not bringing up this
massive forklift of just storageafter storage.
And the other thing that worthnoting is that generally all the
processing that's done, when thecontent originally comes in,
there's things that need tohappen.
If there's commercials need tobe put in.
If there's different bit rateslike hd, 4k, so on and so on,
(13:48):
all that stuff can happen in theOR origin data centers.
So anything that goes intogiving you the final product
that could be done at the originsite, no need for that to be in
the Edge sites.
The Edge sites.
are really just.
again, CDN Content delivery.
Those edge sites, which is thecontent delivery network, they
are just there so people canreach the content and pull it.
(14:09):
We're not, it's not processingit, it's not putting a bow on
it, making it look pretty.
It's not responsible for givingyou the thumbnails when you're
searching through the, yourcatalog on Netflix or Disney
plus it.
,it's just there.
It's giving you the raw data.
So I kind of, yeah.
So I kind of stopped there, letyou guys ask any questions cause
(14:31):
I didn't wanna have that be 10minutes of discussion without
giving you a chance to digestwhat I just said, So, yeah.
Is there anything there thatdidn't make sense or was you
didn't realize was the case?
Kyle (14:43):
I guess with the the, caching part of it, is that just
based on the amount of hits oris there some sort of like
predictive thing that happensthere?
Alex (14:52):
Yeah.
it'd be actually a good topic toactually get somebody that works
in that department and know forsure, but there's definitely,
they're the heavy hitter shows.
just using Disney Plus as anexample, if the new episode of
the Mandalorian comes out,That'll get preloaded into all
the Cashs, even before we haveany metrics to say that people
are gonna hit it just becausethey know it's gonna happen.
Kyle (15:11):
Oh,
Pat (15:11):
Sure.
Alex (15:12):
we'll say, Hey, it's launching on Friday.
We'll proactively start jobswhere, the origin sites will
start sending it to all CDNs sothe CDNs have it ready.
But if there's a show that maybejust kind of took people by
surprise yeah, there's metricsthat are involved with that
saying, Hey, this is getting hitpretty heavily.
And it's also not.
a thing where we just have tosend it out to all CDNs too.
(15:33):
So again, you might have, like Isaid, three or four origin
sites.
You could have 50 edge sites ora hundred edge sites, and
depending on the content too,you may only send it to a
certain region.
A good example would just belike, if you have a, an Italian
language movie, I mean, it'sprobably not be quite as popular
here in the United States, butan Italian Edge site, someplace
(15:55):
that's like a data center inRome, we might, that might, get
pre-sent to knowing that hey,
Pat (15:59):
All right.
Alex (15:59):
it's a, big Italian language movie.
This is likely to be popularhere.
We'll pre-sent it.
Pat (16:06):
Yeah, that makes sense.
So I, so from what I'm hearingis this sort of, and I'm kind of
rolling back into the routingdays, CDN has a similar flavor
of like any cast, right?
So you're not going to one to.
You're not going to oneparticular site, you're going to
the closest.
So for example, Google's dns,quad eights, right?
(16:27):
Or, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2.
Like, those things don't live inone particular place.
They're any casted and they're,they're at multiple places
throughout the globe and youjust go to the closest one
there.
Is that a fair comparison as faras like, or are they running a
cdn.
Type of thing where they'reusing that service and that's
(16:48):
kind of what it is.
Alex (16:50):
There is some many cast, but it's probably not what you
think it is.
Real.
There's these things calledtraffic controllers.
so that's what people arereaching out to originally.
So when you're, resolvingsomething and trying to hit play
on something for the first time,you're gonna reach out to a
traffic controller, and that maybe anycast, which means you're
gonna log into a closest trafficcontroller.
But all that traffic controlleris gonna do is see where you're
(17:11):
coming from, is aware of all theCDNs in their current.
Utilization and then based onmaybe a couple other metrics
that are probably pretty obviouswhen you see them, we'll make a
determination where it'llredirect you to, so you reach
the traffic controller, thetraffic controller's heading
back, Hey, go to this guy.
(17:32):
Based on everything that I'mpaying attention to, it makes
most sense that, Hey, youreached out from, The central PA
probably makes sense for you togo to Pittsburgh, cuz Philly's
hit pretty hard right now orsomething like that.
Pat (17:49):
Okay, That's interesting.
Alex (17:52):
Yep.
Pat (17:52):
Yeah, that sounds pretty good.
I'm, I'm, I'm following you sofar, so not a whole lot of smoke
over here.
Following you so far,
Alex (17:58):
not completely lost yet.
Okay.
All right.
Anything else?
And if not, I'll probably gointo another topic, which is
just kind of like cloud, wherethis stuff is actually being
built today and utilizing those.
Pat (18:13):
Yep.
Actually before we do that,would it make sense to just kind
of throw some names out there asfar as some of the bigger CDN
providers, just to say, Hey, ifthese are a couple of the key
players, they're big in thespace, and then, that'll
resonate with, some folks outthere say, oh yeah, my company
uses that, or, whatever.
Alex (18:30):
Yeah, there's this little guy I called aws
Pat (18:33):
He's so tiny
Alex (18:35):
Yeah.
They just, they run the world.
Akamai, if you're not in the it,you might not realize how big
Akamai is.
Akamai is monstrous.
and.
don't wanna go as far as, saythey have the biggest CDN in the
world, but it's close.
It's gotta be close.
Pat (18:48):
I would,
Alex (18:49):
if you're talking about just CDN reach globally, it's
probably between Verizon, Akamaiand AW s.
And in the case of Disney, it'sno secret they use all of them,
to some degree.
And yeah.
Yeah, those, those are the bigplayers.
There's some other smaller ones.
Fastly.
Pat (19:07):
CloudFlare is up there as
Alex (19:10):
well.
CloudFlare is isn't it boughtout by Amazon?
Or am I thinking something else?
Pat (19:15):
I think they're standing on their own.
Alex (19:17):
fact.
Oh, so that's another, that'sanother budget thing.
We need a fact checker
Pat (19:23):
We get a producer on this show just to talk in our ears
while we Now, CloudFlare is upthere.
Like you said, Fastly is thereas well.
Amazon, obviously Akamai,Amazon.
I think it's called CloudFront,if I'm not
Alex (19:37):
That's why, that's what, that's It's CloudFront.
Yeah.
So when you said CloudFlare, Iwas thinking CloudFront.
Yeah.
Pat (19:43):
Azure has their own Microsoft Azure, cdn, so there,
there's a, there's a few of'emin the space that really, are
some, some heavy hitters.
So, yep.
Google's another one.
Yep.
Alex (19:52):
I'm sure uses their own to service YouTube.
I'm sure they're just usingtheir own environment.
Yep.
Pat (20:00):
So
Alex (20:00):
so I guess now that we know
Pat (20:01):
there,
Alex (20:02):
yeah, there's options think AWS and Akamai were some
of now.
it seems like we mentionedearlier that everyone's coming
out with their own streamingservice.
All these other guys that haveany type of footprint globally
are trying to get into thisspace.
And it's the same kind of setup.
It's just they are putting faststorage that can.
(20:27):
I mean, they're not, I don'twanna call'em done, but they're,
they're limited in what they do,but they do it well and they can
do it in a footprint that'smakes it very easy to continue
to expand all over the world.
Pat (20:40):
There you
Alex (20:40):
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So I guess, ha, having said thatI wanted to touch a little bit
on that and cost the entry for acdn, or.
any type of network.
It's, it's the draw with allproviders, aws, Google so on and
so on, is that there's such aninitial investment.
You set up your own network orset up your own CDN that I don't
(21:04):
see any scenario where somebodywho's new to the streaming game,
whether it be Disney, a fewyears back, Hulu.
which I realize is owned byDisney now, or any of these
smaller like, paramount and, no,there's probably all kinds of
other ones,
Pat (21:20):
Discovery plus that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Alex (21:22):
yeah, just things like that.
People that have content andthen they decide, hey, we have
to have some type of streamingoffering.
Because the initial investmentis so heavy, pretty much
everyone is utilizing Cloudproviders, which is what we all
know and understand.
But I think the juggernauts,which I'll just focus on,
Netflix and Disney have grown sobig now where they actually can
(21:46):
do this cheaper themselves.
So now that there's a, atransition now where now they're
trying to get off of Amazon anddo it themselves, which is where
Netflix is right now.
They used to be completely onAWS and now AWS is only used for
processing.
So just like I mentionedearlier, if you're really
(22:06):
talking about content deliverynetworks, you're really kind of
focusing on the edge of that,where people actually pull the
content.
So as of right now, I don't,maybe they're still servicing it
somewhere, but for overwhelmingmajority of the traffic, it goes
to Netflix.
You're hitting some data centerwhere they actually own the
equipment on site and thingslike thumbnails that I mentioned
earlier.
(22:28):
Any of the analytics processingthat goes into, producing the
results for what it recommends.
That's all done with AWS today.
And again, they, that's publicknowledge.
They acknowledge that, butthey're transitioning it off.
And that's what you're seeingacross the board right now
because the, the costsassociated with some of these
(22:49):
juggernauts in Amazon, they'retalking about billion dollar.
Pat (22:54):
Oh, I
Alex (22:54):
I mean, to a vendor nine figure bills, yearly bills.
So now they're getting to thepoint where, okay, it makes
sense to go on this billiondollar plus investment to build
my own cdn.
you may not, might take you ayear or two, but you know, if
you continued growth, yeah, it'sonly gonna get worse and worse.
And the more, the longer youwait, the harder it is to get
off.
(23:15):
That kind of thing.
Yeah.
So that.
Currently what we're seeingright now is and same with
Disney.
The idea is they, they, wannabuild their own CDNs.
They want to get off thedependencies of these CDN
providers and do it themselves,and with the ultimate goal to
save money.
Pat (23:32):
Yeah.
No, I agree a hundred percent.
So that kind of brings me to aquestion that I had once we take
a, a breath here.
You talked about internet and,sort of the, the nine figure
bills that they're, that thesestreaming giants are pushing, to
these vendors and whatnot.
Like what does that internettraffic cost look like then as
well?
I mean, that's gotta be anastronomical bill as far as you.
(23:58):
Like, like you're, you'repaying, for all that throughput.
I mean, that has to be tons andtons of throughput.
I would assume that streaminghas to be a major percentage of
the internet, of the totaloverall internet traffic out
there.
I would assume so.
Like what does that bill looklike from a usage perspective?
Boy.
Alex (24:18):
Yeah, for sure.
And that, that's why it's soeasy to go into things like
these Amazon and Google atfirst, because.
Their model, their billingmodels is based on utilization.
So as your utilization goes up,your bill goes up.
But again, just like entry in ispretty easy.
But yeah.
Now as we're transitioning outand all these providers are
(24:40):
transitioning out, if you lookat the bandwidth statistics of
like Netflix and Hulu and Disneyit's internet traffic that, a
few years back where individualdata centers or pops things like
a major city is terabytes orterabytes per second of internet
Pat (24:58):
I believe it.
Alex (24:59):
To service all this stuff.
And yeah, like you said the,that is a monstrous bill that
could be tens of millions ofdollars to get all of of these
internet circuits.
These CDN providers, they'reforced to do it.
I mean, they have to provide theservice to their clients, and
that's how they do it over theinternet.
(25:19):
But a big thing that's a hugepush for all these internet
providers, or I'm sorry, allthese content providers is a
concept of private peering.
So I think everyone's prettyfamiliar with you get an
internet connection from a bigprovider.
Verizon or CenturyLinks.
The other anyone's familiar, thedifferent tiers.
(25:39):
Tier one provider are thebiggest players and have the
biggest reach tier twos the nextlevel down, so on and so on.
So again, people are kind ofaccustomed to that.
You buy an internet circuit with'em, you have internet access
and you pay a monthly fee forit.
The bigger the circuit, thebigger the, the internet
connection, the, and the morecostly it is.
(25:59):
And at this point with these CDMproviders, you're talking about
400 gig circuits and lots ofthem, so it could get incredibly
expensive.
But the thing to note is sincetheir content delivery networks
uh, then user is what's, justeveryone's sitting at their
house.
(26:20):
That is who is pulling thistraffic?
That's who the traffic is goingto initially.
So there's a huge push right nowto get in contact with the tier
two and tier three internetproviders.
These are gonna be guys likeSpectrum and Charter Crown
Castle, cogent.
There's several others.
They have a really bigresidential base that is
(26:42):
consuming a lot of streamingtraffic.
YouTube, Netflix, Disney, andthe idea is, If people aren't
aware, these tier two providers,if they need to reach Disney and
they happen to go through a tierone provider, say like Charter
in order to get to us, has to gothrough Verizon.
They actually have to payVerizon to use their network uh,
(27:04):
to use them as a transit so thatthe whole concept between with
private peering is you havethese big providers, they'll go
to these.
Still very large ISPs that areresidential focused and they'll
do something a private peeringagreement.
The whole idea is we'll connectto each other.
(27:24):
I'll only give you my Disneystreaming content, which is the
only thing that they'reconcerned about.
So I won't use you for anythingtransit.
Like I won't traverse you toreach Verizon.
You won't traverse me to useanything else.
You'll only use this directconnection to me for streaming.
And I.
use it again to provide you guyswith streaming content and then
(27:44):
we won't bill each other for it.
So what that turns into is whatused to be tens of millions of
dollars of internet traffic.
Now we can.
offload so much of thatbandwidth by coming into these
agreements with all these bigproviders.
Like I said, crown Castle,cogent charter just any mom and
pop internet connection.
(28:05):
And it's mutually beneficial.
It's like we don't have to paythe tier one providers.
They don't have to pair the tierone providers.
You're that much closer to ourservice or latency goes down a
little bit.
You're cutting out a middle manif troubleshooting is ever
necessary and.
That's just where it's going.
It's so popular to do right now.
And and this isn't anything new.
Private peering has beensomething that's been in place
(28:28):
for a long time that people do.
When it's mutually beneficial tocut out the middleman, private
peering is a way to go.
It's just now it's a veryobvious when you're a big player
like Disney, we'll get peoplereaching out to us.
so another concept worth notingis the idea of MeetMe rooms.
Just carrier hotels.
So when you're coming up withedge sites, or mid-tiers or
(28:50):
origin sites, it's beneficial tolook for data centers that are
considered carrier hotels.
It's locations where lots ofmajor players are in and just,
we'll take Philadelphia forexample, since.
pat, you've probably been downthere a few times.
4 0 1 North Broad Street.
Mm-hmm.
that's one of the most, that's amassive carrier hotel on the
(29:11):
Northeast there in Philadelphiathat every major internet
carrier is in that building.
They have some type of equipmentin there.
So because everyone's theregenerally there is a designated
Meet me room, which is just aroom that generally has just a
few really dumb.
And just patch panels.
(29:33):
And it provides a very simpleway to get connectivity to all
these providers.
And we utilize that concept whenwe're picking out data centers
and, looking for places that wecan get connections other
vendors quickly, easily.
And, just ends up being how muchmoney is internet bill because,
(29:54):
Half your traffic is going to,Comcast Charter, and you can
just get those two directconnections for it.
It's literally going the, themaintenance fee for like the
data center provider to plug inthis physical connection might
be$250 a month, but they couldsave you a hundred thousand
(30:16):
dollars a month.
Just that one connection and youjust keep doing that over and
over again.
It's, as I mentioned earlier,it, it works in many different
levels.
Just troubleshooting's easiercuz there's one less person to
deal with.
Just latency is lower becauseyou're not traversing hops, you
don't need to.
And our bill is much lower andit would be great if we get to
(30:38):
the point where these streaminggiants become so big that even.
The Verizons of the world whokind of felt I think have sat at
the top for so long, they mightjust get to the point where it's
like, fine, just connect to usfor free because, we have some
residential customers, it's likeand Yeah, cuz it might just end
(30:59):
up turning into a situationwhere, you know, the, they want
the best service for theircustomers because it's such a
draw to have the best possibleservice.
because that's the other thingyou can do when you have direct
pairings that I didn't go intocuz I didn't want to go overly
networking or overly technical.
But quality of service Qs that'skind of lost once you start
getting into multiple vendorsand you get internet.
(31:21):
Just cuz no one's gonna carewhat you what QS stuff you want.
you have a direct connection toComcast and Comcast wants to
make sure that.
In the event that we blow up oneof our backbone connections for
something, at least make surethat Disney gets their or make
sure Netflix gets their fairshare.
So that gives you some optionsthat you haven't had before.
(31:42):
I think that starts to blur theline and that
Pat (31:44):
That's a good topic
Alex (31:45):
goes on.
Pat (31:46):
No, that's interesting.
Cause I knew the meet me roomsand the, the the pairings and
whatnot.
They've been going on for a fewyears and just trying to get,
closer to your customer andbasically like you said, cutting
out the middle man and, thingsof that nature.
So I think that's, that'sinteresting to see that kind of
come, to, come to life or atleast be a little more,
mainstream.
And if it's doable then youknow, then great.
(32:07):
Cuz yeah, obviously that's a tonof traffic that you're pushing
and.
Anything you can do to get alittle closer and, cut down
that, that latency and jitterand all that other crazy stuff
and, have at it, and they're,they're, they're more than happy
to, to do that.
Cause that just means betterperformance, at the, at the end
user.
So that, that's pretty cool.
Alex (32:26):
Yeah, I agree.
So I think that kind of gave apretty good.
Overview of kind of CDNs wherethey are today, where they're
going.
In this case we just talkedabout how they can save some
money, so hopefully that'sinteresting.
I was considering going into abit more detail of like how some
(32:47):
of these streaming providerswork, but I don't know if it
makes sense to get into thatmuch detail.
So I guess I'll leave it to youguys.
Is there any.
Obvious uh, questions that cameup that you could think of,
anything that you wanted to talkabout a little bit more?
Pat (33:04):
Huh.
I guess I'm questioning like,okay, say, say I'm here and I
and you guys have a, have anedge in Philly.
And so I'm, I'm basically goingto Philly.
Like how do they, is it just, isit just all, obviously it's UDP
traffic cuz it's all streaming,but like how does that work with
like, is it just a, it's just acopy of whatever.
(33:27):
I'm trying to watch.
Correct.
Like how much, like how, howmany cop, for lack of better
words, how many copies do y'allkeep around it?
in particular, is there a limit?
Like, is it just, Hey, I, Irented 50,000 copies.
If this thing is out, thatperson's it's gonna be so l
like, how does that work?
Alex (33:44):
Well, I think I'll answer your question correctly, but
yeah, it kind of goes back tothat concept of origin sites
where you may only have threesites that have all the data and
that data wound up gettingcopied to maybe middleman data
centers that might only holdabout half the traffic, and then
ultimately to the edge sitesthat have caching.
So I mean,
Pat (34:04):
Hmm.
Alex (34:05):
If you're talking about the, the newest and greatest
show, it might be on everysingle CDN on the planet.
I mean, let means justtechnically at any given time
you have a hundred copies of thecontent.
So yeah, not sure if thatanswered your question or not,
but yeah,
Pat (34:19):
how it goes.
That's how it rolls.
No, that's good.
No, I was, I'm always curiousabout that, Kyle.
What?
Kyle (34:25):
So then when it comes to the, the edge sites and stuff
like that, when you, you're likethe end user and you're, you're
reaching out to, to playsomething, are you just.
Getting gigantic files.
Are they like little snippets orlike, or if you're mobile or
something like that.
I mean, you're not just gettingsmacked with huge data.
Like you're like, oh, I wantedto watch a movie and I just
(34:45):
downloaded four gigs worth ofthe content.
Like,
Alex (34:49):
For sure.
Yeah.
So these, yeah, a show or even amovie is, it's obviously a,
obviously a massive file andit's not realistic for people to
download, a what, what's a 20gig file for maybe a 4K movie?
so I talked about a little bitabout how there's processing, so
this is where it kind of goesaway from CDNs a little bit.
(35:11):
So cdn, Do what they do.
But again, they're not veryintelligent, so they don't do
any type of processing.
They have the content on themand they, people pull the
content from them.
But when people are actuallyreaching out to view a movie or
view a show, what they're, whatthey end up doing is, They reach
out to something and they get amanifest file, and what that
(35:33):
manifest file is is like a listof URLs and each one of those
URLs actually points back to.
Very specific chunk of content.
So I probably should havestarted off by saying when you
get these massive files like amovie you'll actually, when
they're processed, thatgenerally well Netflix case,
(35:55):
it's an aws or whatever datacenter that's doing this
processing, they'll take thatfile that might be 90 minutes
long and turn it into thousandsof five second clips.
What that allows you to do iswhen the player, whether it be,
and not only do I should back upagain, again, not only will they
(36:16):
break it up in the five secondchunks, they'll also break it up
in the five different chunks atdifferent bit rates.
That'll all go to like what yourbandwidth is.
If you're rocking a 3Gconnection somewhere, you might
get the 360 p version of it.
And if you're, even if you're amobile device it'll default to
probably not giving you the 4Kcontent, even if you technically
(36:36):
the 4K phone, just cuz it's hardto tell a difference.
It might default to a seven 20 pcontent, which is much less
bandwidth.
Yeah.
But the whole idea is it hasthese five second chunks, it all
different bit rates, each one ofthose chunks and bit rates will
have some type of URL that getsyou access to them.
So say you're on a phone, you'reat a decent connection, maybe
(36:58):
you.
I don't know, say five.
Make connection, not quiteenough to download best content
available.
I'll go back to those trafficcontrollers I talked about.
Again, those traffic controllerswill be able to see what your
connection speeds are at, andthen, based on that, not only
direct you to the right cdn,which could, which will probably
be nearby, but they'll directyou to the CDN and the specific
(37:20):
URLs, the specific manifestfiles that will give you the
content at the bit rate thatthey think is acceptable.
So what you end up doing as theend user device is you're
downloading maybe 15 seconds ofcontent at a time that gets
cashed on your device.
That's, that 15 seconds is verysmall in the grand scheme of
(37:40):
things.
And if you ever look at your, ifyou look at a PC and you're
steaming something, you'llactually see your temp files
constantly churning because it'spulling these five second
content might download three of'em.
It's cashing it, and really fastmemory.
And then as soon as it's donewith it, it deletes it and goes
over and over and over again.
So even though it might be a 20gig file, you probably only need
(38:02):
to at any given point, store afew megs worth of it.
It turns into like, 10, 15seconds of it.
So
Kyle (38:10):
Really awesome.
Alex (38:11):
that's kind of how it works.
Pat (38:13):
That is awesome man.
This is such cool stuff.
just it's crazy.
Who doesn't love this stuff?
It's my question.
Who doesn't love it?
Did you wanna touch on anythingelse before we go into some of
the futuristic, putting our,putting our not our tinfoil hat,
but you know, something in thefuture hat on and seeing where
that goes.
Alex (38:32):
Ah, don't wanna give people too much.
So I think that's a goodoverview.
If they want more, maybe we cando a follow up,
Pat (38:37):
if you want more, hit us up.
Let us know If that's somethingyou're into.
We can really get into the weedsand, I dunno, maybe Alex, you
can bring one of your reallysmart friends on and that, that
deals with this a little waymore than than even just the
surface that, that we're doingit and have'em come on and nerd
out even harder.
This is awesome,
Alex (38:56):
Sounds good.
Pat (38:57):
So where do you see the future of streaming slash CDNs
going?
Because they're, they'reobviously here, they've been
around for a while.
I think late nineties is CDNsstarted in like the late
nineties, I wanna say somewherearound there.
And they were just a way todeliver like static H T M L
pages faster to.
(39:18):
To people and it's kind ofevolved over, over time.
And here we are now, we're nowwe're pushing terabytes of data
through this thing.
So where do you see it going?
Alex (39:26):
there's a few things.
I'm really interested to see howgaming might take advantage of
CDNs.
I know was it stadia?
Pat (39:35):
Yeah,
Alex (39:36):
Google's gaming.
So I'm kind of curious howthey'll do that.
Because there's so many thingsthat are, sure they're similar,
but they're fundamentallydifferent.
You can't buffer for 15 secondswhen you're playing a first
person shooter.
So I am curious if they come upwith like, just gaming that's
streamed, you don't have a, aconsole.
(39:59):
How CDNs.
right now I kept saying thatCDNs are kind of dumb.
They service content, but maybethere'll be a slight evolution
where this, in addition toserving content, they can also
do some basic processing that'srelated to gaming, where it's so
yeah, interested with that.
(40:20):
the other things that come tomind that.
people are doing a lot of right.
Uh, the streaming giants evolveanalytics and some of the things
that they're doing are arereally interesting.
Cuz when you're talking aboutthese massive streaming giants
that the, small things thatthey're doing analytics wise,
cause they have so much data Ithink it'd be great to see how
(40:41):
much impact they're having.
And one example I'll give and.
For Netflix and maybe you don'tknow this but when you're
cycling through Netflix, see athumbnail for every show.
You know, you're cycling throughit, You see a little thumbnail
about it.
For every show, there will be atleast three or four iterations
(41:03):
of that thumbnail, and in somecases considerably more, and
they'll modify that thumbnailbased on your viewing.
And one clear cut example I'llgive is um, cause I was just
reading this the other day, isGoodwill Hunting.
Great movie.
Matt Damon, Ronnie Williams.
But if they say you see that youhave a tendency to referring a
(41:24):
certain actor, be it Matt Damon,be it Rob Williams, a thumbnail
that you'll have will make surethat Rob Williams or Matt
Damon's on it.
If you don't like either but youlike romantic movies, you'll get
a thumbnail where Matt Damon iskiss.
What's Mini Driver is that hername, the Female Lead.
So to like a romantic movie, ifyou have a tendency to prefer
(41:44):
comedies, you'll see the scenewhere Robin Williams and Matt
Damon are cracking up oversomething.
They're both just have huge foif you prefer dramas, you'll see
one where the two are embracinglike a very serious moment.
And I thought that was sointeresting.
The other example they gave wasstranger Things.
(42:04):
If you have a tendency to.
Horror or or maybe more maturecontent, you'll get a much
darker image.
Whereas if you tend to have morefamily friendly content, you'll
actually get a picture of thefour kids.
Pat (42:18):
Huh?
Look at
Kyle (42:19):
that's wild.
Alex (42:21):
and I just, when I was reading that article, I thought
to myself that it seems sosimple given you have this data
of trends that people have, andI think that would have a
profound impact on what people.
because I, I can, I know it haswith me things that I'm not
familiar with.
That thumbnail immediately peaksmy interest one way or another.
Pat (42:41):
that's interesting.
I just wanna know where can Iget a thumbnail of a Bigfoot
show that I wanna watch Howmany, yeah, how many thumbnails
of Bigfoot can I get?
The one that I really, reallylike?
Is that out there?
Could somebody tell me?
Alex (42:57):
on Hulu, they're searching for Bigfoot documentary.
I watched that.
That's pretty
Pat (43:01):
love it.
I love.
Bigfoot and UFOs.
C Can I get,
Kyle (43:04):
Yes,
Pat (43:04):
can I get an alien one, like four different iterations
of aliens?
I'm in there.
Alex (43:11):
so think about that next time you go to Netflix is think
of the stuff that you like inyour case if you like UFOs, and
then maybe look at content andyou'd be surprised how many of
the thumbnails are focused onwhat you like.
Pat (43:24):
See now I can't.
That's gonna be something Ican't unsee from now on.
Now you've said that I'll justbe like, God damn big brother
Jesus.
They're always trying to get usto buy more that is wild.
Alex (43:36):
that's just Netflix and I'll let you guys bring up
anything if you think of it.
But Disney's doing somethingsimilar where if you go to the
parks now you get wristband thatkind of keeps track.
Rides that you ride and theplaces that you eat.
But the whole idea is they wannakeep, they want to create an
(43:57):
ecosystem, like a, a systemwhere they're streaming their
theater experiences and theirpark experiences are all
combined together.
So what they'll end up doing isif they see you've gone to the
Guardians, the Galaxy Ride,while you were.
Now, next time you go on toDisney Plus, it'll start
(44:17):
suggesting the cards.
The Galaxy trilogy.
Pat (44:20):
That's time to be alive.
God damn
Kyle (44:26):
Wow.
Alex (44:27):
Yeah.
So, and they, it works theopposite way too.
If they see that you tend towatch a lot of Star Wars stuff
when you go to the park and youhave the wristband or you have
the companion.
It'll actually suggest, Hey,this Ride and Galaxy's Edge, the
Star wars attraction, thisride's got a short weight
Pat (44:47):
There you go.
Look at that.
Look at that fun fact.
The wife and the family and Iare going to Disney in December,
right before Christmas.
So yeah, the wife's best friend,her son plays in a middle school
band, and they got invited downto Disney.
So they're going, so we're allgoing, I think it's right before
(45:07):
December.
And also I'll say this publicly.
The wife downloaded an app todaythat tracks how many days we
have left to Disney.
I dunno how I feel about that sofar.
I'm She's like, Hey, there's twoheart and 63 days, and 11 hours,
47 minutes till we hit Disney.
I'm like, thanks for thatreminder, honey.
Appreciate it.
Alex (45:27):
I'll one nerd you
Pat (45:28):
Oh.
Alex (45:29):
Uh, my wife, my wife's a programmer.
We're going to Disney in april.
She created a website a tickerof when we leave.
Pat (45:37):
that's some next level stuff right there.
I love
Kyle (45:40):
It's amazing.
Pat (45:40):
it.
But I'll tell you what, the wifeand I went Disney on our
honeymoon before we had kids,and Disney is just as much fun
for adults as it is for kids.
I'll tell you that right now.
And that.
Alex (45:52):
Oh, yeah.
The most fun you can have is not
Pat (45:54):
oh my.
Oh, it's amazing.
And let me tell you, that avatarride that they have down there
in Florida, that is the bestride I have ever, ever, ever
been on.
So if anybody's listening outthere
Alex (46:06):
in Animal Kingdom.
Pat (46:07):
the one that, yeah, the one in Animal King that was brand
new.
Right when we, like when we gotthere, it was literally less
than six months old and weliterally got off the plane onto
the.
Bus or whatever it is.
The, the, the bus that that pfrom the airport got on that
bus.
Our first day was at AnimalKingdom and our first fast pass,
which I don't think they do fastpasses anymore, but at the time
(46:28):
they did the Fast Pass, the, ourfirst fast pass was for that
ride and literally we were, Iwas like, I got off that ride
and I was like, this vacationcould be over right this minute
cuz that was the best ride Icould ever been on.
It was
Alex (46:42):
it's funny you mentioned that.
That is, that's the thing I'mlooking forward to the most in
the whole, the troll trip.
We're gonna be there April 15th.
It's Pandora's flight, I'm sureis what you're talking about, in
Animal Kingdom.
So yeah, I'm going
Pat (46:56):
It's so good.
It's so, we did it twice.
That's how good it was.
We had fast passes for both andI was like, this is this is the
most boss ride ever.
Like, holy.
Oh my God, it's amazing.
And of course, in true Disneyfashion, at the end of the ride,
you lo you walk out of thebuilding, you lo down this long
corridor or whatever, and itdrops you in into a gift shop.
So Disney never misses anopportunity to sell you
(47:17):
something
Alex (47:19):
know.
they know what they're doing.
Pat (47:20):
Hannah.
Yes, they do.
So, yeah, so, if you love theavatar ride as much as I did,
hit me up on Twitter, let's talkabout it.
Cuz I, I can't, I can't getenough, I can't, I can't find
people that like it, like asmuch as I did.
It is, it was, it was awesome.
I loved it.
Every, every minute in Disneywas great.
So, yeah.
So, where, where, where are youstaying in Disney, Alex?
Alex (47:41):
I am staying at one of the resorts, but it's one of the
real cheaper ones animation soI'm not doing it cuz my kids are
older now, but, so was one ofthe cheaper ones.
But yeah.
Animal Kingdom on April 14th.
and Epcot on Saturday at 15th.
And yeah, I already have a listof all the rides.
Pat (48:01):
Epcot was
Alex (48:02):
cuz I, I live, I live real close to Anaheim, like 10
minutes from Anaheim, so I cango to Disneyland anytime I want.
And there's, at Disneyland,there's two parks.
There's Disneyland andCalifornia Adventure and there's
two parks.
of the four in Disney World thatare very similar to those two.
So Animal Kingdom and epcot arethe two that are unlike the two
(48:23):
in here in Anaheim.
So those are the two we're goingto.
Pat (48:26):
Animal Kingdom ended up being my favorite park, to be
honest.
It was awesome.
I loved it.
It was great.
So yeah, so just an interestingnote on that one.
But, yeah, man, we're, we'll,we'll be there in December and
we'll see what kind of mess wecan make with two kids now.
So it's a
Alex (48:41):
Oh yeah.
And then we'll have to letpeople know how our Disney plus
was
Pat (48:47):
That's right.
Alex (48:47):
it.
See
Kyle (48:48):
Yeah,
Alex (48:48):
start getting avatar
Pat (48:50):
it.
Maybe just from thisconversation they'll start
popping up cuz they're listeningall the time.
Who knows?
We'll see what happens.
Alex (48:57):
Yep.
That's the world we live in.
I already got four emails.
Pat (49:01):
So, uh, anything else boys, before we wrap up and get outta
here?
We're right around that hourmark, which is which is our
sweet spot.
Alex (49:08):
No, I think we're good.
Hope people got some out ofthat.
Maybe after the recording isstopped, we'll talk more about
Disney World, but people don'tneed to hear about that.
Pat (49:17):
If you wanna hear more about us talking about Disney
world, let us know.
We'll certainly sit here andthrow a few high points in.
no, that, that's, that's gonnabe it.
this was awesome.
Great discussion on CDNs andkind of what they bring to the
world.
So thanks again for joining thisweek on Breaking Down the Bites.
Actually visit our website,breaking bys pod.io.
That's where you can subscribeto the show, on your favorite
(49:41):
platform of choice.
Most of you come from ApplePodcast, formerly known as
iTunes.
that's what our stats tell usanyway.
So there's a link for that.
Spotify, Google Podcast,Stitcher.
Or if you just need a RSS feed,that's up there as well.
So you don't miss a show, right?
Throw us a rating on ApplePodcasts.
That'd be awesome.
Simply tell a friend.
That's cool too.
(50:01):
We've, gotten some really goodfeedback lately and we're
tweaking as necessary.
So e e every bit of feedbackreally does help.
Kind of you.
Guide these shows and get youwhat you want to hear.
So, awesome there too.
Twitter and Instagram, Facebook,discord server.
The survey that we have outthere, the feedback survey, it's
all in the show notes for yourplatform of choice for socials.
(50:22):
So, all right, fellas.
It's been a good one.
Awesome, awesome time and we'llsee everybody again next week.
Bye everybody.
Kyle (50:29):
So long.
Alex (50:30):
Two.
Hey everybody.
Welcome back to this week'sedition of Breaking Down the
Bites.
As usual, I'm your host, pat.
You can find me on Twitter atlayer eight packet.
That's the number eight.
Kyle's here too.
He's on Twitter as well at Dan 256.
You can find the show on Twitterat breaking bites.
Pod we're pretty active onTwitter, so come say hello.
(00:22):
If you like the show, don'tforget to subscribe to your
streaming platform of choice.
We are back for another week.
The three amigos are here, readyto roll, ready to get pretty
nerdy.
Is this topic, this week's topicis gonna be awesome in my
opinion.
So, what's up Kyle?
What's going on man?
Kyle (00:39):
Super excited.
This is gonna be great.
Another, another wonderful.
Pennsylvania Day.
There's the weather for you,
Pat (00:44):
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
I was looking forward to that.
I really was.
It was cold today, man.
It really was,
Kyle (00:52):
Yeah, it's gross.
Pat (00:53):
out there.
I went to St.
Patty State Parade.
for those of you that know, knowme or just know me virtually,
my, my Pops has been playing thebag prize for like 20 years and
he actually started when we werein college, Kyle.
It was, it was funny.
They, they ushered in a newpresident at the college we were
at and they actually hired apiper to play like the ceremony
(01:14):
or whatever.
And my dad thought that waspretty cool.
And he picked up pipes and he'sbeen playing ever since.
So he is going on 20 years ofplaying, playing the old pipes,
which only has eight notes bythe way.
For those of you that arewilling for a fun fact that the
bagpipes only have eight notes.
So anyway, so yeah, we went tosee him today, play, St.
Patty's Day parade, and we tookthe grandkids and it was really
(01:35):
cold out there, but, but we didit and we made it so it was all
good.
But it was, it was pretty wick.
It was like f like 15 with thewindchill.
It was pretty crazy.
So not a good time.
Alex.
You have warmer weather whereyou're at, out there, you don't
get, you don't get very cold.
cold.
nights out there, eh,
Alex (01:56):
Nah, it's gonna be, there's gonna be a few days in
the low sixties this week.
Spa colds gets
Pat (02:03):
River
Kyle (02:04):
Sounds terrible.
Pat (02:06):
This is awful.
no.
So we are back this week.
We appreciate everybody joiningas usual.
Just a couple of housekeepingitems before we get into the
nerdy stuff.
Last week I talked about theCisco Champions Radio podcast
that was released, or that Ishould say that I did, with them
on the Catalyst 95.
X series, that was actuallyreleased last week.
(02:27):
So they were much quicker than Ithought they would be with the
release of that episode,depending on where, that one
fell in the schedule.
So, that is out there now.
Go check that out.
Cisco Champions Radio, 9,500 x.
also a link.
To the podcast will be in theshow notes for this week.
So, to make it easy for y'all tofind it and, go from there.
So that's, one item.
The next item is, we didn'trealize it at the time, but last
(02:50):
week was our 50th episode, theBig Five.
Oh gentlemen.
That was, that's some sort of amini milestone, I think.
Wouldn't you say?
Alex (02:59):
right.
I wish I had like one of thoseparty blows.
Yeah.
Pat (03:05):
we need, we need sound effects on this show.
Maybe that's in the next budget.
I don't know.
We'll see.
Alex (03:09):
Mm-hmm.
Kyle (03:10):
you go.
Pat (03:10):
Yeah, so the big 50.
So thanks everybody for tuningin with us.
So everyone that's made thisshow possible guests.
Listeners, you guys as co-hosts,my man Dean who originally
started it with me, so, he's abig part of this as well, even
though he's not with us anymore.
So just a big thanks toeverybody.
We made to, we made it to 50, sowe're gonna keep going until
people tell us to stop.
(03:32):
So, they're like, oh my God, wewish those guys would just shut
up already.
If that happens, just, justtweet at us and tell us the,
the, the no, no hard feelings.
Last one for us is I, I attendeda event last week with our good
friend Nikki Townson, who shewas on the show, a while back.
She has a nonprofit called TechAware, which basically, helps
(03:53):
women.
Get into the tech fields, orbusiness in general.
So she does a lot of things withlike LinkedIn headshots and
resume, pointers and basicallyjust exposing women and
connecting women to all these,bunch of places and sponsors
and, things of that nature.
she had their, tech wear hadtheir big.
Event last week at the Microsoftcampus in Malvern, Pennsylvania.
(04:15):
So, I literally, one of ouroffices is right up the road,
literally less than two miles.
So I worked down there for todayand, shot down the road and, and
went to support her.
And let me tell you, it was.
Packed.
It was just people everywhere.
And, so she's doing really bigthings over there.
Her and her team over at TechAware.
So Go Tech, go check them out.
Their link will be in the shownotes there as well.
(04:37):
I think it's techaware.tech istheir website.
So if you're a, a woman outthere looking to make
connections with our other,Women in business and trying to
get into tech.
Certainly check them out andthey have a whole bunch of
resources there.
So shout out to Nikki and hercrew for putting on that, that
event.
That was some, that was really,really something to see.
So, just a couple of notes therefor this week.
(04:58):
House cleaning before we getonto the nerdy stuff.
So, and now the nerdy stuff,ladies and gents, here we go.
We need a soundboard.
A sound transition would've beengood right there, but we
digress.
This week we are doing a c d NDeep Dive Content delivery
(05:19):
networks.
So, Alex, you are gonna drivethis one, or I should say the
majority of it.
We're gonna pop in questions andhave a decent discussion on
where we fall short.
We, as in Kyle and I fall shortwith the cdn, technologies and,
and whatnot.
Yeah, cdn, this week's gonna bea really good one.
See if we can kind of get goingand if anybody sees any smoke
(05:40):
out their window, that's, that'sthis podcast thinking and
collectively coming together andtrying to make a mess of this.
So we'll see what happens.
So, Alex, you wanna take itaway, my friend, and go from
there.
Alex (05:51):
Sure thing.
So yeah, there's another onethat we talked about for a bit,
and now that I have a fewmonths, well actually it's
almost a year at this point, atDisney streaming, I have some
insider info.
And even though I felt like Iknew the technology pretty well
before, I certainly feel like Iknow it pretty well now.
(06:12):
So just like last time, it'ssimilar to the Azure.
Podcast that we had a little bitago.
It'll be a deep dive.
Probably won't be quite astechnical as yours was but we'll
see how it goes.
First thing I wanted to do wasjust high level overview of what
CDN someone is listening tothis, I would imagine you have a
little bit of background maybe,maybe not So just like it sounds
(06:33):
CDN Content Delivery Network,it's a whole idea is it's a
network and it's and onlypurpose is delivering content.
To the end user, which seemspretty straightforward, but I
mean, ultimately that that'swhat it is.
And I mean, it can't beanything.
It could be, it could be apodcast if it really wanted to.
(06:55):
It could be just a web servertraffic.
But I think we're gonna focus onvideo streaming cuz don't have
the stats to back it up, But I'mgonna assume that 90% of the
traffic Traversing CDNs isrelated to it the sudden just
massive increase in thestreaming players out there.
(07:16):
I mean, what started as beinglike a a Netflix thing is now,
at this point, I'm kind ofshocked if some random network
doesn't have their own streamingvariant, whether it be,
discovery Paramount, cvs, youname it, they all have one now.
But obviously there's somegiants in the room.
Netflix, Certainly Hulu andDisney, which is what I'm
(07:40):
familiar with.
And then some other big playerslike Apple.
So yeah, like I said, we'llfocus on CDNs as it relates to
transition into talking aboutstreaming and not related to
cdn, but starting with that withCDNs and we'll, we'll just use
Disney here.
(08:01):
The concept of a cdm right nowis there's so much storage
that's involved with storing allthis stuff So, I mean, you think
about Netflix and Disney'scatalog of content, it it's
enormous.
I mean the, the terabytes andwhatever comes out, the
petabytes, of storage neededfor,
Pat (08:19):
Yeah.
Alex (08:21):
right.
And the whole idea is there'sall this content you want to get
it to people across the.
and you wanna be for performancereasons.
You wanna be as close to thoseend people, end users as you
can.
But it, it's not realistic totake all that massive amount of
storage and put it 60 places inthe world.
It's just doesn't make financialsense.
(08:43):
But it also doesn't make sensethat you have everyone in the
world trying to watch strangerthings and maybe there's just
one server in, Las Vegas.
Los Angeles that serves thatcontent for the rest of the
world.
So that's kind of where CDNscome right in.
It's getting as close to the pas possible as you can to the
end user at a price that makessense.
(09:07):
And the way they do that is kindof how you architect CDNs.
You have the concept of anorigin site.
that's going to have all thestorage.
It, it's gonna every singlecatalog, every, everything from
the newest episode of StrangerThings to, I don't know, some
off the wall, like whatever youcan think of is.
(09:27):
Use your imagination.
Whatever you may think of that'snot popular.
All that's stored in theseorange origin sites and without.
Going into too much detail andsaying anything that I'm not
allowed to say about Disney, it,it's universal.
Across all these streaminggiants, they're going to have
probably less than five of thesein the whole world less than 10
certainly.
(09:47):
And I think Netflix has three.
That's public knowledge.
So the idea is all their data.
You need redundancy.
You can't have a a site gooffline.
You lose some content, but youdon't need many.
So we'll just assume five or andthe other thing worth noting is
that storage, there's not allstorage is treated the same.
You have storage that's betterused for writing and deleting or
(10:13):
racing content and putting newcontent really quick.
and, dynamic content, content isgonna be there one day, gone the
next, or maybe even here, onehour gone the next hour.
Then you have storage that isn'tas good with that.
It's, it's meant to store it andstay there and you can get to
it, but it's a little slower,but you can hold more so that
(10:35):
you can think of your originsite as that's gonna be the
massive amounts of storage asfar as like just size.
but that's going to be the IO oras fast as it can read and write
is gonna be much slower thanwhat you're gonna have at the
Edge sites.
Where the edge sites are gonnabe the exact opposite.
You're gonna have much lessstorage, but they can pull and
(10:58):
retrieve content and sendcontent much faster than other
storage.
And those are the two extremes.
The very edge site where this iswhere actually the users are
getting content and the originsite.
all the content lives.
I think Netflix does the exactsame thing in most streaming
providers.
It's also sometimes a, middlemanas well.
(11:19):
So you might have the concept ofan origin site that might only
be, two continents in the world,two, three places in the world.
You might have something like amid-tier or mid site data
center, and that might hold,say, 50% of the content.
And then you'll have edge siteswith that might legitimately
(11:41):
only hold 5% of all the entirecatalog.
But the thing that that makesthat work is that 5% of the
content which can be stored onthese edge caching nodes cdn,
that might legitimatelyconstitute 95% of all the
(12:01):
traffic.
Pat (12:02):
Wow.
Alex (12:02):
Like you get the, the, the Netflix top 10 sites or top 10
shows, top 10 movies.
Pat (12:08):
Yep.
Alex (12:09):
And even extrapolate that back cuz there's so much
content.
Let's say the top 50, you takethe top 50, that might only be
5% of the, of their entirecatalog cuz they have thousands
of things on their catalog.
Pat (12:21):
Right, right.
Alex (12:22):
But you take those top 50 and you put'em on the caching
node.
And that might, like I said,service 95% of all the.
So you need to be able to accesscontent when you need to.
But the fact is, is that thesecashing nodes with a very
limited amount of storage andcan write data and delete data
(12:43):
very quickly.
They're kind of like constantlyout there with just the the most
popular content.
ultimately that's how they getaway with.
Lot more sites, they can getclose to the customers because
they just don't need datacenters full of storage.
You can have a few devices.
(13:03):
And I think what some peopledon't realize is an origin site,
which I said has all the contentthat might be an entire data
center, floors full of equipmentwhere.
An Edge site, they might justany of these streaming
providers, they might just gointo a data center provider and
say, I need two racks and just,you can put it anywhere.
So your cost to entry so quick,just turning up.
(13:26):
You can do these so quickly cuzyou're not bringing up this
massive forklift of just storageafter storage.
And the other thing that worthnoting is that generally all the
processing that's done, when thecontent originally comes in,
there's things that need tohappen.
If there's commercials need tobe put in.
If there's different bit rateslike hd, 4k, so on and so on,
(13:48):
all that stuff can happen in theOR origin data centers.
So anything that goes intogiving you the final product
that could be done at the originsite, no need for that to be in
the Edge sites.
The Edge sites.
are really just.
again, CDN Content delivery.
Those edge sites, which is thecontent delivery network, they
are just there so people canreach the content and pull it.
(14:09):
We're not, it's not processingit, it's not putting a bow on
it, making it look pretty.
It's not responsible for givingyou the thumbnails when you're
searching through the, yourcatalog on Netflix or Disney
plus it.
,it's just there.
It's giving you the raw data.
So I kind of, yeah.
So I kind of stopped there, letyou guys ask any questions cause
(14:31):
I didn't wanna have that be 10minutes of discussion without
giving you a chance to digestwhat I just said, So, yeah.
Is there anything there thatdidn't make sense or was you
didn't realize was the case?
Kyle (14:43):
I guess with the the, caching part of it, is that just
based on the amount of hits oris there some sort of like
predictive thing that happensthere?
Alex (14:52):
Yeah.
it'd be actually a good topic toactually get somebody that works
in that department and know forsure, but there's definitely,
they're the heavy hitter shows.
just using Disney Plus as anexample, if the new episode of
the Mandalorian comes out,That'll get preloaded into all
the Cashs, even before we haveany metrics to say that people
are gonna hit it just becausethey know it's gonna happen.
Kyle (15:11):
Oh,
Pat (15:11):
Sure.
Alex (15:12):
we'll say, Hey, it's launching on Friday.
We'll proactively start jobswhere, the origin sites will
start sending it to all CDNs sothe CDNs have it ready.
But if there's a show that maybejust kind of took people by
surprise yeah, there's metricsthat are involved with that
saying, Hey, this is getting hitpretty heavily.
And it's also not.
a thing where we just have tosend it out to all CDNs too.
(15:33):
So again, you might have, like Isaid, three or four origin
sites.
You could have 50 edge sites ora hundred edge sites, and
depending on the content too,you may only send it to a
certain region.
A good example would just belike, if you have a, an Italian
language movie, I mean, it'sprobably not be quite as popular
here in the United States, butan Italian Edge site, someplace
(15:55):
that's like a data center inRome, we might, that might, get
pre-sent to knowing that hey,
Pat (15:59):
All right.
Alex (15:59):
it's a, big Italian language movie.
This is likely to be popularhere.
We'll pre-sent it.
Pat (16:06):
Yeah, that makes sense.
So I, so from what I'm hearingis this sort of, and I'm kind of
rolling back into the routingdays, CDN has a similar flavor
of like any cast, right?
So you're not going to one to.
You're not going to oneparticular site, you're going to
the closest.
So for example, Google's dns,quad eights, right?
(16:27):
Or, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 2, 2.
Like, those things don't live inone particular place.
They're any casted and they're,they're at multiple places
throughout the globe and youjust go to the closest one
there.
Is that a fair comparison as faras like, or are they running a
cdn.
Type of thing where they'reusing that service and that's
(16:48):
kind of what it is.
Alex (16:50):
There is some many cast, but it's probably not what you
think it is.
Real.
There's these things calledtraffic controllers.
so that's what people arereaching out to originally.
So when you're, resolvingsomething and trying to hit play
on something for the first time,you're gonna reach out to a
traffic controller, and that maybe anycast, which means you're
gonna log into a closest trafficcontroller.
But all that traffic controlleris gonna do is see where you're
(17:11):
coming from, is aware of all theCDNs in their current.
Utilization and then based onmaybe a couple other metrics
that are probably pretty obviouswhen you see them, we'll make a
determination where it'llredirect you to, so you reach
the traffic controller, thetraffic controller's heading
back, Hey, go to this guy.
(17:32):
Based on everything that I'mpaying attention to, it makes
most sense that, Hey, youreached out from, The central PA
probably makes sense for you togo to Pittsburgh, cuz Philly's
hit pretty hard right now orsomething like that.
Pat (17:49):
Okay, That's interesting.
Alex (17:52):
Yep.
Pat (17:52):
Yeah, that sounds pretty good.
I'm, I'm, I'm following you sofar, so not a whole lot of smoke
over here.
Following you so far,
Alex (17:58):
not completely lost yet.
Okay.
All right.
Anything else?
And if not, I'll probably gointo another topic, which is
just kind of like cloud, wherethis stuff is actually being
built today and utilizing those.
Pat (18:13):
Yep.
Actually before we do that,would it make sense to just kind
of throw some names out there asfar as some of the bigger CDN
providers, just to say, Hey, ifthese are a couple of the key
players, they're big in thespace, and then, that'll
resonate with, some folks outthere say, oh yeah, my company
uses that, or, whatever.
Alex (18:30):
Yeah, there's this little guy I called aws
Pat (18:33):
He's so tiny
Alex (18:35):
Yeah.
They just, they run the world.
Akamai, if you're not in the it,you might not realize how big
Akamai is.
Akamai is monstrous.
and.
don't wanna go as far as, saythey have the biggest CDN in the
world, but it's close.
It's gotta be close.
Pat (18:48):
I would,
Alex (18:49):
if you're talking about just CDN reach globally, it's
probably between Verizon, Akamaiand AW s.
And in the case of Disney, it'sno secret they use all of them,
to some degree.
And yeah.
Yeah, those, those are the bigplayers.
There's some other smaller ones.
Fastly.
Pat (19:07):
CloudFlare is up there as
Alex (19:10):
well.
CloudFlare is isn't it boughtout by Amazon?
Or am I thinking something else?
Pat (19:15):
I think they're standing on their own.
Alex (19:17):
fact.
Oh, so that's another, that'sanother budget thing.
We need a fact checker
Pat (19:23):
We get a producer on this show just to talk in our ears
while we Now, CloudFlare is upthere.
Like you said, Fastly is thereas well.
Amazon, obviously Akamai,Amazon.
I think it's called CloudFront,if I'm not
Alex (19:37):
That's why, that's what, that's It's CloudFront.
Yeah.
So when you said CloudFlare, Iwas thinking CloudFront.
Yeah.
Pat (19:43):
Azure has their own Microsoft Azure, cdn, so there,
there's a, there's a few of'emin the space that really, are
some, some heavy hitters.
So, yep.
Google's another one.
Yep.
Alex (19:52):
I'm sure uses their own to service YouTube.
I'm sure they're just usingtheir own environment.
Yep.
Pat (20:00):
So
Alex (20:00):
so I guess now that we know
Pat (20:01):
there,
Alex (20:02):
yeah, there's options think AWS and Akamai were some
of now.
it seems like we mentionedearlier that everyone's coming
out with their own streamingservice.
All these other guys that haveany type of footprint globally
are trying to get into thisspace.
And it's the same kind of setup.
It's just they are putting faststorage that can.
(20:27):
I mean, they're not, I don'twanna call'em done, but they're,
they're limited in what they do,but they do it well and they can
do it in a footprint that'smakes it very easy to continue
to expand all over the world.
Pat (20:40):
There you
Alex (20:40):
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So I guess, ha, having said thatI wanted to touch a little bit
on that and cost the entry for acdn, or.
any type of network.
It's, it's the draw with allproviders, aws, Google so on and
so on, is that there's such aninitial investment.
You set up your own network orset up your own CDN that I don't
(21:04):
see any scenario where somebodywho's new to the streaming game,
whether it be Disney, a fewyears back, Hulu.
which I realize is owned byDisney now, or any of these
smaller like, paramount and, no,there's probably all kinds of
other ones,
Pat (21:20):
Discovery plus that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Alex (21:22):
yeah, just things like that.
People that have content andthen they decide, hey, we have
to have some type of streamingoffering.
Because the initial investmentis so heavy, pretty much
everyone is utilizing Cloudproviders, which is what we all
know and understand.
But I think the juggernauts,which I'll just focus on,
Netflix and Disney have grown sobig now where they actually can
(21:46):
do this cheaper themselves.
So now that there's a, atransition now where now they're
trying to get off of Amazon anddo it themselves, which is where
Netflix is right now.
They used to be completely onAWS and now AWS is only used for
processing.
So just like I mentionedearlier, if you're really
(22:06):
talking about content deliverynetworks, you're really kind of
focusing on the edge of that,where people actually pull the
content.
So as of right now, I don't,maybe they're still servicing it
somewhere, but for overwhelmingmajority of the traffic, it goes
to Netflix.
You're hitting some data centerwhere they actually own the
equipment on site and thingslike thumbnails that I mentioned
earlier.
(22:28):
Any of the analytics processingthat goes into, producing the
results for what it recommends.
That's all done with AWS today.
And again, they, that's publicknowledge.
They acknowledge that, butthey're transitioning it off.
And that's what you're seeingacross the board right now
because the, the costsassociated with some of these
(22:49):
juggernauts in Amazon, they'retalking about billion dollar.
Pat (22:54):
Oh, I
Alex (22:54):
I mean, to a vendor nine figure bills, yearly bills.
So now they're getting to thepoint where, okay, it makes
sense to go on this billiondollar plus investment to build
my own cdn.
you may not, might take you ayear or two, but you know, if
you continued growth, yeah, it'sonly gonna get worse and worse.
And the more, the longer youwait, the harder it is to get
off.
(23:15):
That kind of thing.
Yeah.
So that.
Currently what we're seeingright now is and same with
Disney.
The idea is they, they, wannabuild their own CDNs.
They want to get off thedependencies of these CDN
providers and do it themselves,and with the ultimate goal to
save money.
Pat (23:32):
Yeah.
No, I agree a hundred percent.
So that kind of brings me to aquestion that I had once we take
a, a breath here.
You talked about internet and,sort of the, the nine figure
bills that they're, that thesestreaming giants are pushing, to
these vendors and whatnot.
Like what does that internettraffic cost look like then as
well?
I mean, that's gotta be anastronomical bill as far as you.
(23:58):
Like, like you're, you'repaying, for all that throughput.
I mean, that has to be tons andtons of throughput.
I would assume that streaminghas to be a major percentage of
the internet, of the totaloverall internet traffic out
there.
I would assume so.
Like what does that bill looklike from a usage perspective?
Boy.
Alex (24:18):
Yeah, for sure.
And that, that's why it's soeasy to go into things like
these Amazon and Google atfirst, because.
Their model, their billingmodels is based on utilization.
So as your utilization goes up,your bill goes up.
But again, just like entry in ispretty easy.
But yeah.
Now as we're transitioning outand all these providers are
(24:40):
transitioning out, if you lookat the bandwidth statistics of
like Netflix and Hulu and Disneyit's internet traffic that, a
few years back where individualdata centers or pops things like
a major city is terabytes orterabytes per second of internet
Pat (24:58):
I believe it.
Alex (24:59):
To service all this stuff.
And yeah, like you said the,that is a monstrous bill that
could be tens of millions ofdollars to get all of of these
internet circuits.
These CDN providers, they'reforced to do it.
I mean, they have to provide theservice to their clients, and
that's how they do it over theinternet.
(25:19):
But a big thing that's a hugepush for all these internet
providers, or I'm sorry, allthese content providers is a
concept of private peering.
So I think everyone's prettyfamiliar with you get an
internet connection from a bigprovider.
Verizon or CenturyLinks.
The other anyone's familiar, thedifferent tiers.
(25:39):
Tier one provider are thebiggest players and have the
biggest reach tier twos the nextlevel down, so on and so on.
So again, people are kind ofaccustomed to that.
You buy an internet circuit with'em, you have internet access
and you pay a monthly fee forit.
The bigger the circuit, thebigger the, the internet
connection, the, and the morecostly it is.
(25:59):
And at this point with these CDMproviders, you're talking about
400 gig circuits and lots ofthem, so it could get incredibly
expensive.
But the thing to note is sincetheir content delivery networks
uh, then user is what's, justeveryone's sitting at their
house.
(26:20):
That is who is pulling thistraffic?
That's who the traffic is goingto initially.
So there's a huge push right nowto get in contact with the tier
two and tier three internetproviders.
These are gonna be guys likeSpectrum and Charter Crown
Castle, cogent.
There's several others.
They have a really bigresidential base that is
(26:42):
consuming a lot of streamingtraffic.
YouTube, Netflix, Disney, andthe idea is, If people aren't
aware, these tier two providers,if they need to reach Disney and
they happen to go through a tierone provider, say like Charter
in order to get to us, has to gothrough Verizon.
They actually have to payVerizon to use their network uh,
(27:04):
to use them as a transit so thatthe whole concept between with
private peering is you havethese big providers, they'll go
to these.
Still very large ISPs that areresidential focused and they'll
do something a private peeringagreement.
The whole idea is we'll connectto each other.
(27:24):
I'll only give you my Disneystreaming content, which is the
only thing that they'reconcerned about.
So I won't use you for anythingtransit.
Like I won't traverse you toreach Verizon.
You won't traverse me to useanything else.
You'll only use this directconnection to me for streaming.
And I.
use it again to provide you guyswith streaming content and then
(27:44):
we won't bill each other for it.
So what that turns into is whatused to be tens of millions of
dollars of internet traffic.
Now we can.
offload so much of thatbandwidth by coming into these
agreements with all these bigproviders.
Like I said, crown Castle,cogent charter just any mom and
pop internet connection.
(28:05):
And it's mutually beneficial.
It's like we don't have to paythe tier one providers.
They don't have to pair the tierone providers.
You're that much closer to ourservice or latency goes down a
little bit.
You're cutting out a middle manif troubleshooting is ever
necessary and.
That's just where it's going.
It's so popular to do right now.
And and this isn't anything new.
Private peering has beensomething that's been in place
(28:28):
for a long time that people do.
When it's mutually beneficial tocut out the middleman, private
peering is a way to go.
It's just now it's a veryobvious when you're a big player
like Disney, we'll get peoplereaching out to us.
so another concept worth notingis the idea of MeetMe rooms.
Just carrier hotels.
So when you're coming up withedge sites, or mid-tiers or
(28:50):
origin sites, it's beneficial tolook for data centers that are
considered carrier hotels.
It's locations where lots ofmajor players are in and just,
we'll take Philadelphia forexample, since.
pat, you've probably been downthere a few times.
4 0 1 North Broad Street.
Mm-hmm.
that's one of the most, that's amassive carrier hotel on the
(29:11):
Northeast there in Philadelphiathat every major internet
carrier is in that building.
They have some type of equipmentin there.
So because everyone's theregenerally there is a designated
Meet me room, which is just aroom that generally has just a
few really dumb.
And just patch panels.
(29:33):
And it provides a very simpleway to get connectivity to all
these providers.
And we utilize that concept whenwe're picking out data centers
and, looking for places that wecan get connections other
vendors quickly, easily.
And, just ends up being how muchmoney is internet bill because,
(29:54):
Half your traffic is going to,Comcast Charter, and you can
just get those two directconnections for it.
It's literally going the, themaintenance fee for like the
data center provider to plug inthis physical connection might
be$250 a month, but they couldsave you a hundred thousand
(30:16):
dollars a month.
Just that one connection and youjust keep doing that over and
over again.
It's, as I mentioned earlier,it, it works in many different
levels.
Just troubleshooting's easiercuz there's one less person to
deal with.
Just latency is lower becauseyou're not traversing hops, you
don't need to.
And our bill is much lower andit would be great if we get to
(30:38):
the point where these streaminggiants become so big that even.
The Verizons of the world whokind of felt I think have sat at
the top for so long, they mightjust get to the point where it's
like, fine, just connect to usfor free because, we have some
residential customers, it's likeand Yeah, cuz it might just end
(30:59):
up turning into a situationwhere, you know, the, they want
the best service for theircustomers because it's such a
draw to have the best possibleservice.
because that's the other thingyou can do when you have direct
pairings that I didn't go intocuz I didn't want to go overly
networking or overly technical.
But quality of service Qs that'skind of lost once you start
getting into multiple vendorsand you get internet.
(31:21):
Just cuz no one's gonna carewhat you what QS stuff you want.
you have a direct connection toComcast and Comcast wants to
make sure that.
In the event that we blow up oneof our backbone connections for
something, at least make surethat Disney gets their or make
sure Netflix gets their fairshare.
So that gives you some optionsthat you haven't had before.
(31:42):
I think that starts to blur theline and that
Pat (31:44):
That's a good topic
Alex (31:45):
goes on.
Pat (31:46):
No, that's interesting.
Cause I knew the meet me roomsand the, the the pairings and
whatnot.
They've been going on for a fewyears and just trying to get,
closer to your customer andbasically like you said, cutting
out the middle man and, thingsof that nature.
So I think that's, that'sinteresting to see that kind of
come, to, come to life or atleast be a little more,
mainstream.
And if it's doable then youknow, then great.
(32:07):
Cuz yeah, obviously that's a tonof traffic that you're pushing
and.
Anything you can do to get alittle closer and, cut down
that, that latency and jitterand all that other crazy stuff
and, have at it, and they're,they're, they're more than happy
to, to do that.
Cause that just means betterperformance, at the, at the end
user.
So that, that's pretty cool.
Alex (32:26):
Yeah, I agree.
So I think that kind of gave apretty good.
Overview of kind of CDNs wherethey are today, where they're
going.
In this case we just talkedabout how they can save some
money, so hopefully that'sinteresting.
I was considering going into abit more detail of like how some
(32:47):
of these streaming providerswork, but I don't know if it
makes sense to get into thatmuch detail.
So I guess I'll leave it to youguys.
Is there any.
Obvious uh, questions that cameup that you could think of,
anything that you wanted to talkabout a little bit more?
Pat (33:04):
Huh.
I guess I'm questioning like,okay, say, say I'm here and I
and you guys have a, have anedge in Philly.
And so I'm, I'm basically goingto Philly.
Like how do they, is it just, isit just all, obviously it's UDP
traffic cuz it's all streaming,but like how does that work with
like, is it just a, it's just acopy of whatever.
(33:27):
I'm trying to watch.
Correct.
Like how much, like how, howmany cop, for lack of better
words, how many copies do y'allkeep around it?
in particular, is there a limit?
Like, is it just, Hey, I, Irented 50,000 copies.
If this thing is out, thatperson's it's gonna be so l
like, how does that work?
Alex (33:44):
Well, I think I'll answer your question correctly, but
yeah, it kind of goes back tothat concept of origin sites
where you may only have threesites that have all the data and
that data wound up gettingcopied to maybe middleman data
centers that might only holdabout half the traffic, and then
ultimately to the edge sitesthat have caching.
So I mean,
Pat (34:04):
Hmm.
Alex (34:05):
If you're talking about the, the newest and greatest
show, it might be on everysingle CDN on the planet.
I mean, let means justtechnically at any given time
you have a hundred copies of thecontent.
So yeah, not sure if thatanswered your question or not,
but yeah,
Pat (34:19):
how it goes.
That's how it rolls.
No, that's good.
No, I was, I'm always curiousabout that, Kyle.
What?
Kyle (34:25):
So then when it comes to the, the edge sites and stuff
like that, when you, you're likethe end user and you're, you're
reaching out to, to playsomething, are you just.
Getting gigantic files.
Are they like little snippets orlike, or if you're mobile or
something like that.
I mean, you're not just gettingsmacked with huge data.
Like you're like, oh, I wantedto watch a movie and I just
(34:45):
downloaded four gigs worth ofthe content.
Like,
Alex (34:49):
For sure.
Yeah.
So these, yeah, a show or even amovie is, it's obviously a,
obviously a massive file andit's not realistic for people to
download, a what, what's a 20gig file for maybe a 4K movie?
so I talked about a little bitabout how there's processing, so
this is where it kind of goesaway from CDNs a little bit.
(35:11):
So cdn, Do what they do.
But again, they're not veryintelligent, so they don't do
any type of processing.
They have the content on themand they, people pull the
content from them.
But when people are actuallyreaching out to view a movie or
view a show, what they're, whatthey end up doing is, They reach
out to something and they get amanifest file, and what that
(35:33):
manifest file is is like a listof URLs and each one of those
URLs actually points back to.
Very specific chunk of content.
So I probably should havestarted off by saying when you
get these massive files like amovie you'll actually, when
they're processed, thatgenerally well Netflix case,
(35:55):
it's an aws or whatever datacenter that's doing this
processing, they'll take thatfile that might be 90 minutes
long and turn it into thousandsof five second clips.
What that allows you to do iswhen the player, whether it be,
and not only do I should back upagain, again, not only will they
(36:16):
break it up in the five secondchunks, they'll also break it up
in the five different chunks atdifferent bit rates.
That'll all go to like what yourbandwidth is.
If you're rocking a 3Gconnection somewhere, you might
get the 360 p version of it.
And if you're, even if you're amobile device it'll default to
probably not giving you the 4Kcontent, even if you technically
(36:36):
the 4K phone, just cuz it's hardto tell a difference.
It might default to a seven 20 pcontent, which is much less
bandwidth.
Yeah.
But the whole idea is it hasthese five second chunks, it all
different bit rates, each one ofthose chunks and bit rates will
have some type of URL that getsyou access to them.
So say you're on a phone, you'reat a decent connection, maybe
(36:58):
you.
I don't know, say five.
Make connection, not quiteenough to download best content
available.
I'll go back to those trafficcontrollers I talked about.
Again, those traffic controllerswill be able to see what your
connection speeds are at, andthen, based on that, not only
direct you to the right cdn,which could, which will probably
be nearby, but they'll directyou to the CDN and the specific
(37:20):
URLs, the specific manifestfiles that will give you the
content at the bit rate thatthey think is acceptable.
So what you end up doing as theend user device is you're
downloading maybe 15 seconds ofcontent at a time that gets
cashed on your device.
That's, that 15 seconds is verysmall in the grand scheme of
(37:40):
things.
And if you ever look at your, ifyou look at a PC and you're
steaming something, you'llactually see your temp files
constantly churning because it'spulling these five second
content might download three of'em.
It's cashing it, and really fastmemory.
And then as soon as it's donewith it, it deletes it and goes
over and over and over again.
So even though it might be a 20gig file, you probably only need
(38:02):
to at any given point, store afew megs worth of it.
It turns into like, 10, 15seconds of it.
So
Kyle (38:10):
Really awesome.
Alex (38:11):
that's kind of how it works.
Pat (38:13):
That is awesome man.
This is such cool stuff.
just it's crazy.
Who doesn't love this stuff?
It's my question.
Who doesn't love it?
Did you wanna touch on anythingelse before we go into some of
the futuristic, putting our,putting our not our tinfoil hat,
but you know, something in thefuture hat on and seeing where
that goes.
Alex (38:32):
Ah, don't wanna give people too much.
So I think that's a goodoverview.
If they want more, maybe we cando a follow up,
Pat (38:37):
if you want more, hit us up.
Let us know If that's somethingyou're into.
We can really get into the weedsand, I dunno, maybe Alex, you
can bring one of your reallysmart friends on and that, that
deals with this a little waymore than than even just the
surface that, that we're doingit and have'em come on and nerd
out even harder.
This is awesome,
Alex (38:56):
Sounds good.
Pat (38:57):
So where do you see the future of streaming slash CDNs
going?
Because they're, they'reobviously here, they've been
around for a while.
I think late nineties is CDNsstarted in like the late
nineties, I wanna say somewherearound there.
And they were just a way todeliver like static H T M L
pages faster to.
(39:18):
To people and it's kind ofevolved over, over time.
And here we are now, we're nowwe're pushing terabytes of data
through this thing.
So where do you see it going?
Alex (39:26):
there's a few things.
I'm really interested to see howgaming might take advantage of
CDNs.
I know was it stadia?
Pat (39:35):
Yeah,
Alex (39:36):
Google's gaming.
So I'm kind of curious howthey'll do that.
Because there's so many thingsthat are, sure they're similar,
but they're fundamentallydifferent.
You can't buffer for 15 secondswhen you're playing a first
person shooter.
So I am curious if they come upwith like, just gaming that's
streamed, you don't have a, aconsole.
(39:59):
How CDNs.
right now I kept saying thatCDNs are kind of dumb.
They service content, but maybethere'll be a slight evolution
where this, in addition toserving content, they can also
do some basic processing that'srelated to gaming, where it's so
yeah, interested with that.
(40:20):
the other things that come tomind that.
people are doing a lot of right.
Uh, the streaming giants evolveanalytics and some of the things
that they're doing are arereally interesting.
Cuz when you're talking aboutthese massive streaming giants
that the, small things thatthey're doing analytics wise,
cause they have so much data Ithink it'd be great to see how
(40:41):
much impact they're having.
And one example I'll give and.
For Netflix and maybe you don'tknow this but when you're
cycling through Netflix, see athumbnail for every show.
You know, you're cycling throughit, You see a little thumbnail
about it.
For every show, there will be atleast three or four iterations
(41:03):
of that thumbnail, and in somecases considerably more, and
they'll modify that thumbnailbased on your viewing.
And one clear cut example I'llgive is um, cause I was just
reading this the other day, isGoodwill Hunting.
Great movie.
Matt Damon, Ronnie Williams.
But if they say you see that youhave a tendency to referring a
(41:24):
certain actor, be it Matt Damon,be it Rob Williams, a thumbnail
that you'll have will make surethat Rob Williams or Matt
Damon's on it.
If you don't like either but youlike romantic movies, you'll get
a thumbnail where Matt Damon iskiss.
What's Mini Driver is that hername, the Female Lead.
So to like a romantic movie, ifyou have a tendency to prefer
(41:44):
comedies, you'll see the scenewhere Robin Williams and Matt
Damon are cracking up oversomething.
They're both just have huge foif you prefer dramas, you'll see
one where the two are embracinglike a very serious moment.
And I thought that was sointeresting.
The other example they gave wasstranger Things.
(42:04):
If you have a tendency to.
Horror or or maybe more maturecontent, you'll get a much
darker image.
Whereas if you tend to have morefamily friendly content, you'll
actually get a picture of thefour kids.
Pat (42:18):
Huh?
Look at
Kyle (42:19):
that's wild.
Alex (42:21):
and I just, when I was reading that article, I thought
to myself that it seems sosimple given you have this data
of trends that people have, andI think that would have a
profound impact on what people.
because I, I can, I know it haswith me things that I'm not
familiar with.
That thumbnail immediately peaksmy interest one way or another.
Pat (42:41):
that's interesting.
I just wanna know where can Iget a thumbnail of a Bigfoot
show that I wanna watch Howmany, yeah, how many thumbnails
of Bigfoot can I get?
The one that I really, reallylike?
Is that out there?
Could somebody tell me?
Alex (42:57):
on Hulu, they're searching for Bigfoot documentary.
I watched that.
That's pretty
Pat (43:01):
love it.
I love.
Bigfoot and UFOs.
C Can I get,
Kyle (43:04):
Yes,
Pat (43:04):
can I get an alien one, like four different iterations
of aliens?
I'm in there.
Alex (43:11):
so think about that next time you go to Netflix is think
of the stuff that you like inyour case if you like UFOs, and
then maybe look at content andyou'd be surprised how many of
the thumbnails are focused onwhat you like.
Pat (43:24):
See now I can't.
That's gonna be something Ican't unsee from now on.
Now you've said that I'll justbe like, God damn big brother
Jesus.
They're always trying to get usto buy more that is wild.
Alex (43:36):
that's just Netflix and I'll let you guys bring up
anything if you think of it.
But Disney's doing somethingsimilar where if you go to the
parks now you get wristband thatkind of keeps track.
Rides that you ride and theplaces that you eat.
But the whole idea is they wannakeep, they want to create an
(43:57):
ecosystem, like a, a systemwhere they're streaming their
theater experiences and theirpark experiences are all
combined together.
So what they'll end up doing isif they see you've gone to the
Guardians, the Galaxy Ride,while you were.
Now, next time you go on toDisney Plus, it'll start
(44:17):
suggesting the cards.
The Galaxy trilogy.
Pat (44:20):
That's time to be alive.
God damn
Kyle (44:26):
Wow.
Alex (44:27):
Yeah.
So, and they, it works theopposite way too.
If they see that you tend towatch a lot of Star Wars stuff
when you go to the park and youhave the wristband or you have
the companion.
It'll actually suggest, Hey,this Ride and Galaxy's Edge, the
Star wars attraction, thisride's got a short weight
Pat (44:47):
There you go.
Look at that.
Look at that fun fact.
The wife and the family and Iare going to Disney in December,
right before Christmas.
So yeah, the wife's best friend,her son plays in a middle school
band, and they got invited downto Disney.
So they're going, so we're allgoing, I think it's right before
(45:07):
December.
And also I'll say this publicly.
The wife downloaded an app todaythat tracks how many days we
have left to Disney.
I dunno how I feel about that sofar.
I'm She's like, Hey, there's twoheart and 63 days, and 11 hours,
47 minutes till we hit Disney.
I'm like, thanks for thatreminder, honey.
Appreciate it.
Alex (45:27):
I'll one nerd you
Pat (45:28):
Oh.
Alex (45:29):
Uh, my wife, my wife's a programmer.
We're going to Disney in april.
She created a website a tickerof when we leave.
Pat (45:37):
that's some next level stuff right there.
I love
Kyle (45:40):
It's amazing.
Pat (45:40):
it.
But I'll tell you what, the wifeand I went Disney on our
honeymoon before we had kids,and Disney is just as much fun
for adults as it is for kids.
I'll tell you that right now.
And that.
Alex (45:52):
Oh, yeah.
The most fun you can have is not
Pat (45:54):
oh my.
Oh, it's amazing.
And let me tell you, that avatarride that they have down there
in Florida, that is the bestride I have ever, ever, ever
been on.
So if anybody's listening outthere
Alex (46:06):
in Animal Kingdom.
Pat (46:07):
the one that, yeah, the one in Animal King that was brand
new.
Right when we, like when we gotthere, it was literally less
than six months old and weliterally got off the plane onto
the.
Bus or whatever it is.
The, the, the bus that that pfrom the airport got on that
bus.
Our first day was at AnimalKingdom and our first fast pass,
which I don't think they do fastpasses anymore, but at the time
(46:28):
they did the Fast Pass, the, ourfirst fast pass was for that
ride and literally we were, Iwas like, I got off that ride
and I was like, this vacationcould be over right this minute
cuz that was the best ride Icould ever been on.
It was
Alex (46:42):
it's funny you mentioned that.
That is, that's the thing I'mlooking forward to the most in
the whole, the troll trip.
We're gonna be there April 15th.
It's Pandora's flight, I'm sureis what you're talking about, in
Animal Kingdom.
So yeah, I'm going
Pat (46:56):
It's so good.
It's so, we did it twice.
That's how good it was.
We had fast passes for both andI was like, this is this is the
most boss ride ever.
Like, holy.
Oh my God, it's amazing.
And of course, in true Disneyfashion, at the end of the ride,
you lo you walk out of thebuilding, you lo down this long
corridor or whatever, and itdrops you in into a gift shop.
So Disney never misses anopportunity to sell you
(47:17):
something
Alex (47:19):
know.
they know what they're doing.
Pat (47:20):
Hannah.
Yes, they do.
So, yeah, so, if you love theavatar ride as much as I did,
hit me up on Twitter, let's talkabout it.
Cuz I, I can't, I can't getenough, I can't, I can't find
people that like it, like asmuch as I did.
It is, it was, it was awesome.
I loved it.
Every, every minute in Disneywas great.
So, yeah.
So, where, where, where are youstaying in Disney, Alex?
Alex (47:41):
I am staying at one of the resorts, but it's one of the
real cheaper ones animation soI'm not doing it cuz my kids are
older now, but, so was one ofthe cheaper ones.
But yeah.
Animal Kingdom on April 14th.
and Epcot on Saturday at 15th.
And yeah, I already have a listof all the rides.
Pat (48:01):
Epcot was
Alex (48:02):
cuz I, I live, I live real close to Anaheim, like 10
minutes from Anaheim, so I cango to Disneyland anytime I want.
And there's, at Disneyland,there's two parks.
There's Disneyland andCalifornia Adventure and there's
two parks.
of the four in Disney World thatare very similar to those two.
So Animal Kingdom and epcot arethe two that are unlike the two
(48:23):
in here in Anaheim.
So those are the two we're goingto.
Pat (48:26):
Animal Kingdom ended up being my favorite park, to be
honest.
It was awesome.
I loved it.
It was great.
So yeah, so just an interestingnote on that one.
But, yeah, man, we're, we'll,we'll be there in December and
we'll see what kind of mess wecan make with two kids now.
So it's a
Alex (48:41):
Oh yeah.
And then we'll have to letpeople know how our Disney plus
was
Pat (48:47):
That's right.
Alex (48:47):
it.
See
Kyle (48:48):
Yeah,
Alex (48:48):
start getting avatar
Pat (48:50):
it.
Maybe just from thisconversation they'll start
popping up cuz they're listeningall the time.
Who knows?
We'll see what happens.
Alex (48:57):
Yep.
That's the world we live in.
I already got four emails.
Pat (49:01):
So, uh, anything else boys, before we wrap up and get outta
here?
We're right around that hourmark, which is which is our
sweet spot.
Alex (49:08):
No, I think we're good.
Hope people got some out ofthat.
Maybe after the recording isstopped, we'll talk more about
Disney World, but people don'tneed to hear about that.
Pat (49:17):
If you wanna hear more about us talking about Disney
world, let us know.
We'll certainly sit here andthrow a few high points in.
no, that, that's, that's gonnabe it.
this was awesome.
Great discussion on CDNs andkind of what they bring to the
world.
So thanks again for joining thisweek on Breaking Down the Bites.
Actually visit our website,breaking bys pod.io.
That's where you can subscribeto the show, on your favorite
(49:41):
platform of choice.
Most of you come from ApplePodcast, formerly known as
iTunes.
that's what our stats tell usanyway.
So there's a link for that.
Spotify, Google Podcast,Stitcher.
Or if you just need a RSS feed,that's up there as well.
So you don't miss a show, right?
Throw us a rating on ApplePodcasts.
That'd be awesome.
Simply tell a friend.
That's cool too.
(50:01):
We've, gotten some really goodfeedback lately and we're
tweaking as necessary.
So e e every bit of feedbackreally does help.
Kind of you.
Guide these shows and get youwhat you want to hear.
So, awesome there too.
Twitter and Instagram, Facebook,discord server.
The survey that we have outthere, the feedback survey, it's
all in the show notes for yourplatform of choice for socials.
(50:22):
So, all right, fellas.
It's been a good one.
Awesome, awesome time and we'llsee everybody again next week.
Bye everybody.
Kyle (50:29):
So long.
Alex (50:30):
Two.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.