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Apple Edge Cache
- snek 7y agoThis launched around December of 2019. It is the same service that companies like Google[1] and Akamai[2] have provided for a while. [1]: https://peering.google.com/#/options/google-global-cache https://peering.google.com/#/options/google-global-cache [2]: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/products/network-operator/akamai-network-partnerships.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/products/network-operator/akama...
- mcintyre1994 7y agoThis seems smart. Presumably it initially gives everyone a better experience with App Store apps, and over time becomes critical infrastructure for Apple TV+ in the same way Netflix use caches in ISPs.
- ehsankia 7y agoDefinitely critical for Apple TV+ if they want to compete with Netflix and Youtube. Though both of those together account for a quarter of the total bandwidth on internet, I'm not sure if Apple TV+ is anywhere close to that yet, but long term planning here.
- ohmaigad 7y agoUnless there is some kind of limitation for the 1 year free AppleTV+ offer (when buying a new device) it is a terrible service and not even a competitor to Netflix. The prices for movies are abnormal - Predator (a 23 year old movie) is 4.99EUR for rent. For comparison a small market (<2mil people) local streaming service offers the same movie for rent for 1.90EUR.
- yreg 7y agoYou are complaining about iTunes prices, that's unrelated to Apple TV+. Apple TV+ costs a flat fee for unlimited access to (for now very limited) collection of original content. Surely they plan to launch more shows.
- forgotmyhnacc 7y agoI'm confused why ISPs would do this for free. Why doesn't Apple just colo like other CDNs do?
- dylz 7y agoBecause they can serve 100G iOS updates off their own network as opposed to pushing 100G over the internet.
- ceejayoz 7y ago> I'm confused why ISPs would do this for free. No peering on immense libraries of HD video content?
- t0mas88 7y agoBecause most ISPs have cost associated with getting traffic through their upstream provider(s). So this will save the ISP money.
- ehsankia 7y agoJust to give perspective, Netflix and Youtube together constitute almost 25% of the total bandwidth traffic. If you could lower your cost of operation by 25% for free, why would you not?
- revertts 7y agoBecause it saves them money on transit costs. The Internet Peering Playbook is a good resource if you want to learn about some of the economics behind programs like this one (http://drpeering.net/core/bookOutline.html http://drpeering.net/core/bookOutline.html). Edit: the flip side of this relationship is also interesting - if Apple or whoever doesn't offload enough of their traffic to the rack, then it isn't cost effective and can really annoy the ISP. I've known some ISPs to boot these caches out of their network when the related company wasn't utilizing it effectively.
- dfox 7y agoThe question here is why you would host such a device for free instead of just having SFI peering with apple (which is apparently required in this program). I suspect that the incentive there has mostly nothing to do with transit costs and is mainly about capacity planing inside the ISP's network and thus with fixed hardware and infrastructure costs. (ie. SFI is free, but the 100Gbps port on your router is not)
- revertts 7y agoThose traffic requirements are fairly steep - perhaps it will come down as the program matures. If you're interested in similar edge cache programs: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://www.facebook.com/peering/ https://www.facebook.com/peering/ (though I don't see FNA specifically mentioned there) https://peering.google.com/#/options/google-global-cache https://peering.google.com/#/options/google-global-cache https://www.akamai.com/us/en/products/network-operator/akamai-network-partnerships.jsp https://www.akamai.com/us/en/products/network-operator/akama... https://peering.azurewebsites.net/peering/Caching https://peering.azurewebsites.net/peering/Caching https://www.cloudflare.com/partners/peering-portal/ https://www.cloudflare.com/partners/peering-portal/
- ehsankia 7y agoDo you have a rough overview of how the requirements differ across the similar edge programs linked above? If there's one thing Apple does better, it's providing a clean straight forward page with all the relevant info and little fluff.
- jlgaddis 7y agoFor reference, Netflix's traffic requirement for OCA is 5 Gbps, IIRC.
- revertts 7y agoThere are some facility and org requirements depending on the various company's rack setups, but most of that's standard. The main requirement is how much traffic you need to be doing with the peer before they give you a rack - Apple states 25Gbps; more mature programs like Netflix are 5Gbps. Sometimes that's negotiable and they'll hand them out for even smaller traffic amounts (I've heard less than 1Gbps for some of those listed, though won't mention which ones). Like most things in this area of networking, there's a lot of variability and personal contacts involved.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoSome of these deals are even arrived at over beers at a bar at conferences like NANOG (North American Network Operators Group).
- jbverschoor 7y agoStep X of competing with aws, gcp, azure. Arm cpus Serverside swift Foundationdb They’re spending way too much on aws for iCloud, and probably i* distribution
- NetBeck 7y agoIt would be cool if they used the Xserve chassis.
- clopez 7y agoAnd the question is... Do this "Apple certified server-side network appliances" run on Mac or Linux?
- KirinDave 7y agoWhy is this an obvious question about an edge cache?
- jedieaston 7y agoBecause some of us have hope that Apple might be using high-performance commodity hardware with OS X and maybe they’ll let us do that one day too, so we don’t have spend $6000 for a Mac tower. Alas, it is but a dream.
- catblast 7y agoThat’s irrelevant though. I run OS X on kvm, people run hackintoshes. There’s no technical limitation here, never has been, it’s a business decision. Apple obviously isn’t beholden to the licensing terms that they release OS X to their consumers under. If they want to run OS X on commodity hardware they can, and moreover it doesn’t change their positioning to the outside at all.
- tinus_hn 7y agoIf Apple uses Apple hardware to host this they pay the manufacturing cost, not the retail price you pay. It probably wouldn’t look good if they hosted this on third party machines running Mac OS.
- pram 7y agoProbably Linux, but don’t forget Airports ran NetBSD so that’s something else they have internal experience with.
- Thaxll 7y agoObviously Linux since no one uses mac server side, Even Apple doesn't use mac for their online services.
- radicaldreamer 7y agoThe home/small business version of this is included with every installation of OS X: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-caching-on-mac-mchl9388ba1b/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-cac... Popular app and OS updates can be cached on a local Mac, with the recommended machine being on the network using a wired connection and always connected (desktop/Mac mini)
- shiftpgdn 7y agoIf you're a sysadmin you need to take an old mac mini and put this on your wifi or guest wifi network. It alleviates so many support tickets on iOS update release days.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- EricE 7y agoThis! Instead of being a dick and blocking updates just cache 'em!
- duxup 7y agoDo people notice if you block updates on say a work wi-fi? I'm thinking more generally userbase wise and not quite the tech centric crowd we have here on HN. I would expect most people wouldn't notice.
- cerberusss 7y agoI particularly like this blog: https://hashtagwifi.com/blog/apple-content-caching-and-you-setup-and-advanced-options https://hashtagwifi.com/blog/apple-content-caching-and-you-s... It has the same information as Apple's official documentation, but it highlights the advanced options.
- EricE 7y agoIt cache's more than updates. I can see it caching music, video and even iCloud data like my photos or iCloud drive content. For example I can set up a new Mac and have it sync the photos library from iCloud and see it all being served from cache. Pretty cool!
- kick 7y agoApple Edge Cache (AEC) is Apple supplied and managed hardware Do they have something against using dashes?
- derision 7y agoWhere would dashes be placed here?
- kick 7y ago"Apple-supplied." That's what they do elsewhere: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202471 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202471 https://support.apple.com/guide/terminal/script-management-with-launchd-apdc6c1077b-5d5d-4d35-9c19-60f2397b2369/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/terminal/script-management-w... https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201954 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201954 For less ambiguity, I should have used the term "hyphen," but imagined it would be clear.
- briandear 7y agoFascinating. A hyphen and a dash are two completely different things. A dash isn’t ambiguous at all, it’s literally the wrong word. Those who live in glass houses.. https://www.grammarly.com/blog/hyphens-and-dashes/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/hyphens-and-dashes/
- kick 7y agoDigitally, they're _the exact same thing,_ represented by the exact same code point:* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen-minus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen-minus The figure dash _literally_ serves the same purpose as the hyphen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Figure_dash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Figure_dash ASCII was limited, compromises were made, and "dash" and "hyphen" became interchangeable. Most style guides accept both under the term "dash": https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/HyphensEnDashesEmDashes/faq0002.html https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H... * Unicode has changed this somewhat, though not perfectly. Bonus: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/hyphens https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/... Hyphens are a form of dash (-) which we use between words or parts of words.
- pier25 7y agoOff topic... but there are .apple domains now?
- mcintyre1994 7y agoOnly if you’re Apple - they own it and afaik don’t sell domains on it.
- cpmsmith 7y agoA lot of the new TLDs are brand names. https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
- pier25 7y agoWhat does it take to create a new TLD?
- mattl 7y agoMoney
- tialaramex 7y agoYou apply to ICANN. The registration paperwork and associated work will be fairly expensive, figure on spending $1M for a relatively uncontentious proposal, like maybe you want .pier25 that seems plausible unless there's some big community out there which feels they own it (see .amazon) There are two routes, the key differentiator is are the resulting name hierarchy public (like .com) or is it yours and jealously to be guarded from all others (like .mil) ? If the former ICANN will also require you to do a bunch of legal work to ensure that when you fail (because realistically you will) any names can be scooped up and preserved by a new operator of the TLD. If the latter you're likely to have a tougher time defending why you should own this, unless you're a huge global brand. Then you need to either spend a lot of money (again estimate $1M a year at least at first) yourself on infrastructure to serve your TLD, or you need to pay somebody else with relevant experience to do it for you. A surprising number of companies bought vanity TLDs which they then don't use at all because of course they're much less convenient than a short name in an existing TLD. For example the KerryProperties TLD isn't used at all, kerryprops.com is much easier.
- MBlume 7y agoDumb question -- how does this work with SSL? Is Apple putting their private keys on these boxes and assuming the ISPs can't/won't extract them?
- t3rabytes 7y agoGuessing ISPs won't have access to the boxes in a way that'd let them extract them.
- alanfranz 7y agoI can't be sure, but: - It's possible to deliver SSL without putting the keys on boxes; of course there's a need for a network connection to the servers holding keys. It's a tech pioneered by cloudflare, can't rememeber the name. - or, there's no SSL for the content, which is signed otherwise (like ubuntu or debian repos).
- ignoramous 7y ago> ...network connection to the servers holding keys. It's a tech pioneered by cloudflare... They announced Keyless SSL way back when: https://blog.cloudflare.com/keyless-ssl-the-nitty-gritty-technical-details/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/keyless-ssl-the-nitty-gritty-tec... I'm a fan of Facebook's take on this, though: https://engineering.fb.com/security/delegated-credentials/ https://engineering.fb.com/security/delegated-credentials/ Also see, Google's answer to JWTs: Macaroons-- https://hackingdistributed.com/2014/05/16/macaroons-are-better-than-cookies/ https://hackingdistributed.com/2014/05/16/macaroons-are-bett...
- dwild 7y agoAs long as it's dumb content, it doesn't need SSL signed by Apple. Apple own the intelligent layer, the one that hold the API. Once you query those, it answer with the location and the hash, which allow you to download it from the distributed box and safely verify the content.
- elithrar 7y agoDisagree. - TLS is still important to stop tampering of video content or images, as well as user privacy over what content was specifically viewed. - Some ISPs have (and still do) intercept plaintext video content -> transcode to a much lower bitrate -> cache that for their users. That hurts the content provider, as they lose visibility (logs/metrics), and the user who may suffer a reduced experience that the content provider can’t easily fix. End-to-end TLS solves that.
- nixass 7y agoAnd they use AWS for that, at least in Europe. Had a huge orders from them in last few months
- MrBuddyCasino 7y agoIt says its Apple-managed hardware though? Can you elaborate?
- mortdeus 7y ago"Apple Edge Cache (AEC) is Apple supplied and managed hardware for deployment within our ISP partners networks to deliver certain Apple content directly to our shared customers." This sounds horrifying.
- jedberg 7y agoI hope this isn’t the same CDN they use for the App Store. I’ve never seen a download from the store faster than about 50 megabits per sec even on a gigabit line.
- reggieband 7y agoThis appears to be additional to CDNs. Apple is saying they will put their own servers directly into ISPs data centers as a cache for content requests that would normally go to a CDN. So the path for downloading data would go from your computer to your ISP and if the data you requested is cached on your ISPs Apple Edge Cache server then it wouldn't even go to a CDN. This is an attempt to address your complaint which may well be caused by slowness of traffic between the CDN and your ISP.
- jedberg 7y agoCDNs already use servers in your local ISP. That’s how they speed things up. This is no different than how Akamai or Netflix or Cloudflare builds their CDN. Most likely these Apple edge servers sit in cabinets and network segments adjacent to those other CDNs.
- reggieband 7y agoSure, that is the best case scenario. Apple using it's own servers would have several advantages including they would presumably be able to tune/seed the cached content based on superior knowledge of consumption. They also wouldn't be competing for the same limited CDN space as others. Not to be flippant, but I recognized your name and when I visited your bio I see you now work at Netflix. You could probably find an excellent answer as to why Apple would choose to start its own program rather than rely on existing CDN colocation by asking your internal team why Netflix does the same. My guess, without inside knowledge, is it is a combination of price and performance.
- jedberg 7y agoI know why Netflix does what it does, I helped build it. :) What I'm saying is that Apple is probably already doing the same thing (using their own servers in colocations). They're just opening it up to the public now.
- fkjadoon94 7y agoCopyright © 2019 Apple Inc.
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- jonplackett 7y agoAre Apple credible to offer this? The AppStore loads slowly if at all a lot of the time on my Mac. And isn’t exactly spritely on my phone either.
- siteshwar 7y agoDoesn't it break net neutrality ?
- jrockway 7y agoThis is not related to net neutrality. Typically the way things work is that your end-user ISP is connected to a "Tier 1" or "Tier 2" ISP. Then the website you want to visit is also connected to an ISP in a similar manner. To get packets from the end user to the website, the traffic has to transit over the Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs. Those ISPs do not offer this service for free. To lower costs and potentially improve latency, many websites are happy to connect directly to the end-user's ISPs. Imagine that your Internet service is just an Ethernet cable that goes to a router in a datacenter. This is Apple offering to plug their servers into that router. Now you can get to their servers without going out to "the Internet" via a Tier 2 or Tier 1 ISP. That is where the word "internet" comes from -- interconnected networks. More connections is more internetting. This is all super common. Many big companies are happy to peer with small ISPs if they're already in the same building. Edit to add: The edge cache thing that this article is about is similar, but not quite the same as what I'm describing. Instead of connecting you to their network, they just put some of their servers in the same datacenter as your network. Even less latency!
- FortCollinsDev 7y agoFantastic explanation. I actually have an exam on this next Friday.
- david-cako 7y agoEdgeCompute coming soon I suppose.
- mikl 7y agoNice to see them use the .apple TLD.
- jakobmi 7y agoDo they get paid to host this? How much?
- cube00 7y agoI doubt it, they get "paid" by not having to pay for upstream data charges while still charging their downstream consumers.
- kbenson 7y ago> The program is by invitation only. > If your business meets these requirements, request an invitation. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of being "invitation only" which, to me at least, implies the other party knows who they want to invite? That is, invitation only implies hand picked, or pre-chosen by some prior criteria to me. If it's exclusive to select ISPs that meet the criteria and they have to apply, why not just say that instead of the using wording that requires additional explanation to get past people's likely initial interpretation?
- enz 7y agoThis is just marketing jargon
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- dagmx 7y agoIt's a "Hey can I come to your party?" and "I'll think about it and get back to you if you can" versus a "I'm coming to your party despite not being asked"
- kbenson 7y agoI know what they're trying to do, it just feels amateurish and jarring because cause it's jamming two concepts that are somewhat opposed together. The whole point of saying the party is invitation only is so random people don't ask you to come. I think the normal way this is normally done is to say "we're being very selective with who we partner with at this point. Please apply if you think you qualify and we'll get back to you." That they've chosen not to do the obvious seems purposeful, and that it was done so jarringly on purpose is odd.
- vinay_ys 7y agoWith 25Gbps minimum peak, it seems like this is targeted at game apps (which load heavy assets) or short videos apps (which load 10-20MB video assets). If they have streaming capability, then probably more apps can take advantage of it. For all other apps (which load static image assets and much smaller dynamic response payloads), meeting 25Gbps minimum peak is going to be a challenge. Let's do some rough math. Let's say your app needs to load 10MB of assets in every user session. Let's say your user's network speed is not a constraint. Then least number of concurrent users needed to drive 25Gbps of traffic is 25Gbps/10MB = 313 new user sessions per second. If you want to sustain this for 5 minutes or so to register as peak 313 users/second * 5 minutes = 93900 concurrent apple user sessions. Let's say your users realistically have 10Mbps of speed, we will have to multiply 93900 with 8 (because it takes 8 seconds to load 10MB with 10Mbps speed)!
- Slartie 7y agoI think you got the use case of such edge caches wrong. You don't get one of those for a single app. Most companies who participate in such edge cache programs don't even have apps. These are boxes that internet service providers plug into their networks, usually close to their customers, hence the name "edge cache". The edge cache owner then routes user requests for big and static content (video streams, large apps, OS updates, stuff like that) coming from networks equipped with edge caches to the caches located within their networks instead of a third-party CDN or the cache owners own server farms, effectively reducing the traffic that particular ISP has to route through to the edge cache owner. It is this aggregate traffic that has to meet a 25Gbps peak minimum to qualify for getting an Apple edge cache.
- pdimitar 7y agoI am absolutely not informed on the dynamics of these technologies and business agreements so pardon my ignorance. Q: are you getting paid for allocating such a cache? Or should you feel honoured that Apple thinks you are eligible to freely distribute their content?
- ksec 7y agoQuestions. Why now? Apple has had hundred of Millions iOS users for years and fast approaching a billion. Why didn't they do this earlier? Or they did but it wasn't public ? What are the chances this is a Mac Pro rack, even though it is highly unlikely to be running on macOS ? Do they Cache iCloud Backup, Photos and upload with these Edge Appliance? Same as macOS Server?
- nswest23 7y agois this the tiered internet we were warned about?
- fmajid 7y agoThis is for large consumer ISPs, obviously, but Mac OS X Server used to have an optional cache feature for iOS apps and OS X software updates that was relevant for enterprise and campus networks (or even a home network like mine with a 3:1 iDevice to human ratio...)