Google teams with CDN providers to speed up rich media access
Thu 10 Sep 2015
Google is planning to join a group of Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers in a new initiative called CDN Interconnect, through which it hopes to reduce costs and boost rich content distribution speeds for its cloud customers.
The search giant has so far teamed up with four CDN firms including CloudFlare, Highwinds, Fastly and Level 3 CDN. Through these partnerships Google has promised that its Cloud Platform customers using these services will enjoy considerable cuts in the costs related to in-region egress traffic from their cloud infrastructure.
Taking CloudFlare as an example, the company suggested that users transferring files from virtual machines in the Google cloud to customers in a CDN Interconnect region would see significant reductions in data transport fees.
The initiative enables effective load sharing across partnership data centres around the world, lessening the strain caused by rich file transfers between cloud operators and web content providers.
CDNs are a popular way of reducing data transport costs and speeding bandwidth by serving frequently visited files within high-demand regions. Although Google follows this principle with its distributed global data centre network – a portfolio of 70 points of presence (PoP) across 33 countries – it believes a CDN network will achieve a wider coverage.
Google currently pays local ISPs to transfer file data every time a customer in a different region requests it. With the new CDN deal, Google will pay a CDN to serve the data from a data centre already connected to the local ISP network, meaning it will not be required to pay the ISP for each file access.
“CDN Interconnect’s special egress pricing should encourage the best practice of regularly distributing content originating from Cloud Platform out to the edge close to your end-users,” explained Google Cloud Platform product manager Ofir Roval, in a blog post yesterday.
‘Edge’ storage, Google suggests, is expected to become common practice with web users consuming evermore rich media content online and businesses deploying critical applications in the cloud, in large metropolises as well as in less densely populated and remote locations.
“Some of the most popular categories of web and mobile apps loved by users today — social, gaming, video, news, communications — carry with them hefty media assets, from retina-density images to HD video,” said Roval, adding that users are “unlikely to tolerate laggy or unresponsive applications.”
