5 ms·

Apple's CDN is Akamai, which is definitely not "naive". Google DNS is broken as a concept, and shouldn't have been released until they were anycasted in either

Apple's CDN is Akamai, which is definitely not "naive". Google DNS is broken as a concept, and shouldn't have been released until they were anycasted in either all Google CDN POPs (where ever www.google.com is proxied from) or had talked the major CDNs (AKAM, LLNW, L3, etc) into supporting their proposed DNS extension (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-ip-01 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vandergaast-edns-client-ip-...). As it stands, using Google DNS is optimizing exactly the wrong thing -- it may be "faster" than your local ISP (which I've actually never seen), but you're trading a couple of ms on an easily scaled distributed system (which every single ISP in the world provides) for a huge hit on network performance because you get a non-optimal CDN pop. I'd even go as far as saying that Google DNS is ruining the network experience for anyone outside the US (and from Gruber's article, apparently in the US too) -- the very problem people pay CDNs to solve in the first place.

willscott 16y ago
Couldn't the CDN redirect to a closer node if DNS doesn't bring the user to an optimal pop? I'm pretty sure we're talking about an HTTP protocol so a 302 redirect ought to work, and it seems like that would give the CDN way more control than trying to distribute traffic using a cached and not reliably localized DNS mechanism. Edit: foobarbazetc has a good point, but it still feels like the CDN has reasonable ways to work around and do a better job of selecting the correct pop than DNS. Adding a layer of subdomains which force locality (us-ny.host.com) would keep urls readable & virtual hosts intact.
- foobarbazetc 16y ago
  Unfortunately not, because your redirect would have to use an IP address instead of the hostname, so your browser address bar would look like: http://1.2.3.4/ http://1.2.3.4/ Which would send the wrong 'Host' header to the server, and won't serve the right site and/or content through the CDN. :)
  - trotsky 16y ago
    apple tv
jws 16y ago
For my midwestern U-verse vendor supplied DNS server, it is trading annoying timeouts from unanswered queries for a reliable DNS response. But the article makes a good point, and since I have a bind running on my firewall anyway, I'll just take the forwarders out.
trotsky 16y ago
Are you sure Apple is using akamai for video? They have a substantial contract with Limelight and have long been rumored to be bringing traffic in house that had been previously served by CDN. With a long term connection that can withstand a little extra in setup time and a custom built client (both things fit apple tv) it's unnecessary to rely on geo dns anyway.

willscott 16y ago

Couldn't the CDN redirect to a closer node if DNS doesn't bring the user to an optimal pop? I'm pretty sure we're talking about an HTTP protocol so a 302 redirect ought to work, and it seems like that would give the CDN way more control than trying to distribute traffic using a cached and not reliably localized DNS mechanism. Edit: foobarbazetc has a good point, but it still feels like the CDN has reasonable ways to work around and do a better job of selecting the correct pop than DNS. Adding a layer of subdomains which force locality (us-ny.host.com) would keep urls readable & virtual hosts intact.

foobarbazetc 16y ago
Unfortunately not, because your redirect would have to use an IP address instead of the hostname, so your browser address bar would look like: http://1.2.3.4/ http://1.2.3.4/ Which would send the wrong 'Host' header to the server, and won't serve the right site and/or content through the CDN. :)
- trotsky 16y ago
  apple tv

jws 16y ago

For my midwestern U-verse vendor supplied DNS server, it is trading annoying timeouts from unanswered queries for a reliable DNS response. But the article makes a good point, and since I have a bind running on my firewall anyway, I'll just take the forwarders out.

trotsky 16y ago

Are you sure Apple is using akamai for video? They have a substantial contract with Limelight and have long been rumored to be bringing traffic in house that had been previously served by CDN. With a long term connection that can withstand a little extra in setup time and a custom built client (both things fit apple tv) it's unnecessary to rely on geo dns anyway.