Content Delivery Networks

9Preparing for Change in Your Design

9.1 Preface and Philosophy

In these last chapters I am going to turn back to explain more fully why the title of the book, and to think a little about why you picked up the book to read it. I will try to guess what it was you sought from these pages and, admittedly, be making a few obvious assumptions about those things. I am also going to try to offer some thoughts on “how to lay the foundations for a good CDN implementation” and all the work that entails, while writing from as generic a perspective as possible to meet the many different expectations of the readers this book may reach.

This commentary should be viewed purely as an insight into my way of doing things. It is certainly not a “how to” guide for best practice. There are many engineering consultants who can almost certainly offer a more disciplined approach, and indeed 25 years ago I spent studying systems engineering – in particular “decision support” systems – as I was developing computer telephony integration (CTI) for some early call centers I ashamedly built (and I have never quite lived down the guilt!). The analytical design process is fascinating in its own right and can provide a great resource in certain contexts.

In practice, however, I have come to my own conclusion that such disciplined models, if overly enforced, solve the problem that they were designed to solve, but not the particular problem that the client in front of you requires a solution for.

As I moved into ...