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"Railgun" is just a fancy name for Cloudflare's implementation of DSA (Internap and Akamai sometimes call it "Whole Site Delivery"). Every other major CDN offe
by dsl 14y ago
"Railgun" is just a fancy name for Cloudflare's implementation of DSA (Internap and Akamai sometimes call it "Whole Site Delivery").
Every other major CDN offers some variation on this same service. Suck the bits in at a server close to the origin, compress them using proprietary voodoo, expand things at the server closest to the client.
Akamai owns the relevant patents on this (which it acquired from the Netli acquisition) and has used them to sue then acquire other companies like Cotendo. See http://www.google.com/patents/US6820133 http://www.google.com/patents/US6820133 and http://www.google.com/patents/US7293093 http://www.google.com/patents/US7293093
- RobAley 14y agoI'm sure Cloudflare will comment, but it seems a little different to that. Rather than suck the original bits in at a server close to the origin, it looks like it takes the compressed (delta) bits direct from the origin itself.
- modoc 14y agoCorrect. It's ISN'T DSA. It's very promising for eCommerce sites which may have a personalized header (Name, Cart Contents, etc...) and some customized Ads/CTAs/Marketing slots, but where the bulk of the page (often a very large page - 100+ KB) will be the same for everyone. The obvious win is pushing less bytes across the wire. The less obvious win is that it allows the application server response to complete VERY fast, freeing up the app server thread to handle more requests. This is the larger win for large scale 3-tier applications.
- dsl 14y agoSure, but that's just splitting hairs. Rather than colocate DSA appliances with the origin (which again is not new), they simply run the software on the origin machine.