Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services

Chapter 15CDN Capacity Planning

Phil Davies¹ and Mukaddim Pathan¹

¹Telstra Corporation Limited, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

15.1 Introduction

The Content delivery network (CDN) marketplace [1–3] consists of a handful of pure-play providers who continuously seek to simultaneously scale up and diversify their current offerings and customer bases in order to maintain and grow market share.

Services to CDN customers are delivered by way of the provider's infrastructure inventory, so it is critical that this infrastructure is able to scale both vertically and horizontally. That is, be able to support demand for existing services along with improvements in those services required to facilitate ongoing growth in the volume of demand. Also, the infrastructure must have the ability to support rapid innovation in new value-added services, to allow the provider to continue to present relevant and up-to-date offerings, which will be attractive in a competitive marketplace.

CDN infrastructure inventory can be considered as the providers' means of production [4]. To ensure continued long-term business success for the provider, ongoing inventory investments are required, ensuring that a sustainable return for the providers' business is realized. A wide range of factors must be considered when these investments are being made. These factors include a mixture of customer demand, market conditions, corporate business strategy, and regulatory requirements, along with the associated technology ...