Now, CDN.net can’t quite rival the likes of Akamai, Limelight or Level3 in terms of points of presence (PoPs): OnApp’s federation includes just over 150 PoPs, whereas Akamai, for example, has around 1,200 (also, CDN.net itself has launched with just 30 PoPs, although it says more can be added according to demand). However, its services are flexible and available on a pay-per-use basis, allowing it to target smaller businesses rather than blue-chip customers.

And now London-based OnApp is taking on the big CDN players by gunning for their resellers.

Business-in-a-box

It’s doing so by essentially giving those resellers a CDN business-in-a-box. OnApp has “open-sourced” the tools used to build CDN.net, so now service providers – whether or not they are currently in OnApp’s federation, such as PEER1 and UK2 are – can roll out their own rival. The package contains a customer portal, configuration and reporting tools and billing functionality, and it will be available to providers for a usage-derived monthly fee with no long-term contract and no minimum bandwidth commitments.

According to OnApp Federation managing director Stuart Simms, flexibility is again the key here, as service providers can use the ready-made storefront to sell specialized CDN services. What’s more, he promised, OnApp is promising greater profitability than the Akamais and Level3s of this world can offer:

“The OnApp federation is a diverse community of service providers, and now there’s an easy way to tap into that rich resource, and create unique CDN services based on whatever attributes are important to you and your customers — location, speed, quality and more. You can build CDNs across a handful of locations, or across the world; offer more attractive pricing for end users; and still get more margin than you would from legacy vendors, who have to recoup the cost of the entire network.”

Remember that CDN is only part of OnApp’s strategy: storage is another big piece, and compute capacity is coming up too. So this “instant CDN” package, as OnApp calls it, is a model for other virtual service provider packages that will come out later this year.

New entrants

The key here is that these packages are no longer restricted to those service providers who were already offering up their data center resources to be sliced and diced in OnApp’s federation. Now those resources can be exploited by entirely virtual service providers who have no physical infrastructure of their own to offer, but who are willing to pay those fees to OnApp and, in turn, the real infrastructure owners who are making this all possible.

Back to Simms:

“Opening up the federation is the next phase in its growth. It’s great news for our customers, because it’ll drive more traffic for the companies supplying the federation. It’s great news for other service providers, who can take advantage of our CDN service alongside their existing services.

“We’ll see other companies using the network too — technology companies who have struggled with the capital expense of building their own network, who can now focus on innovation. We’ve created a launch pad and channel for business applications, games, social media apps, app stores and all kinds of innovative new services that need global performance and reach, out of the box.”

OnApp said this week that it has almost 600 service provider customers in 68 countries, who are all running clouds based on the company’s orchestration software (which was how OnApp first created its federation). The firm claims this makes it “the most widely used public cloud platform on the market today”.

Of course, this scale doesn’t translate directly into PoPs, and those contemplating reselling OnApp’s CDN are still going to get more reach from Akamai, Limelight et al. However, for a lot of providers – both real and wannabe virtual – OnApp’s terms may prove mightily tempting.

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While public cloud services, including content delivery networks (CDNs), are usually very reliable, no one is perfect. Outages happen, and as a result some companies find themselves looking into multi-cloud strategies to ensure redundancy (and to optimize performance and cost). The issue is that cloud costs and resource allocation are complex — hence the emergence of a new breed of cloud mediation services such as Rightscale and Cedexis.

DT is preparing two complementary services in this space. The first is NetAnalyze, which draws on the billion network measurements that DT’s “community” takes every day, spanning 32,000 networks in 230 countries. Webmasters can put the NetAnalyze tag on their site and visiting customers will then automatically generate anonymized measurement for metrics like throughput and response time.

Then NetOptimize kicks in. When a customer requests the website from wherever they are located, NetOptimize will use the NetAnalyze metrics to determine which provider will deliver the content most quickly, and automatically route the content accordingly. Pricing for this load-balancing service is pay-per-use. The result, in theory, is better performance and lower risk of outages, and also better price-to-performance ratios, given the ability to hop between different providers according to needs.

DT’s website also touts the fact that such multi-sourcing approaches make it easier to avoid vendor lock-in. The company says NetAnalyze and NetOptimize make it possible to “form a unified strategy across multiple platforms (cloud, data center or CDN)”.

A glance at the NetOptimize portal (which appears to default to Japanese, at least from my end) shows that the service covers numerous clouds and CDNs. On the cloud side, we have locations for Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid, InstaCompute, Internap AgileCLOUD, Joyent, PhoenixNAP, Profitbricks, Rackspace Cloud, Softlayer and Windows Azure. For CDN, there’s Akamai, Azure, BitGravity, CacheFly, CDN77, CDNetworks, CDNVideo, ChinaCache, ChinaNetCenter, CloudFlare, Cloudfront, Edgecast, Fastly, Fastweb, Highwinds, Internap AgileCAST, Internode, Level3, Limelight, NetDNA, Ngenix, OnApp, Pacnet, UPX CloudCache and Yacast.

I’ve asked DT for further details of the service, such as when they intend to officially take the wraps off it, and will add their response when I get it.

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OnApp started out selling cloud orchestration software to hosting providers that wanted to get into the public cloud business. Over time, the firm built a sizeable federation of service provider customers, giving them the ability to use each others’ spare capacity – federated CDN launched in 2011; then came distributed storage; and federated compute capacity is next on the horizon.

However, until now OnApp’s game has been all about helping service providers make the most of their spare resources within the federation – one provider may lack a point of presence (PoP) in a certain location but be able to use that of a fellow federation member, for example. CDN.net is OnApp’s first attempt at selling that federated capacity directly to end users, in this case companies that want to boost the performance of their websites in various locations around the globe.

CDN.net offers access to over 150 PoPs, which is not as extensive a network as those offered by Akamai and Limelight, but way bigger than those from smaller players such as Yottaa, MaxCDN and CacheFly — it’s even slightly more wide-ranging than CDNetworks’ network. However, according to CDN.net marketing manager James Fletcher, the real selling point is CDN.net’s flexibility and pay-by-usage pricing:

“It allows the end user to be in control of what they are purchasing … We saw in the marketplace that you can buy CDN and get a one-size-fits all solution, but that doesn’t work for everyone. The end result is you pay for resources and locations you don’t use. The CDN.net vision allows you to spin up on the fly and provision and customize as you need to.”

At launch, CDN.net will only include 30 PoPs with a focus on Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. However, OnApp is working to add locations in emerging markets and users will be able to add locations based on demand. “If the customer comes along and wants somewhere in South Africa, we can work with the service provider network to get one up and running,” Fletcher explained. Livestreaming capabilities will also go live soon.

Ultimately, OnApp is trying to “help line the pockets of the service providers”, as Fletcher put it, but it’s also quietly becoming one of Europe’s most significant cloud players, perhaps the most significant. Others have talked about or even attempted this kind of federated model, but no-one has achieved the sort of scale that OnApp can boast – scale that it achieved by stealth, but that it’s now starting to exploit in earnest.

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Yottaa CEO Coach Wei.

Yottaa, the Boston-based startup which aims to speed up website performance, netted $9 million in Series B funding from initial investors General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Cambridge West Ventures as well as some new-but-unnamed backers. That brings total venture funding to $13 million for the two-year-old company.

Yottaa, which offers both website performance optimization and security services, targets both small-and-medium businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises. SMBs often don’t do a lot to speed up their website performance simply because many of the available solutions — from Cisco or F5 Networks — are too pricey or difficult to implement, according to Yottaa CEO Coach Wei. “In SMBs, we compete with ‘do nothing,’” Wei said in an interview Monday.

In enterprises, it faces off against traditional content delivery networks (CDNs) from Akamai and Limelight. As GigaOM reported last spring, Yottaa uses third-party clouds, including Amazon Web Services to deliver its optimization services.

The new funding will help the company — which already claims good customer momentum — build more. Since Yottaa’s Site Speed Optimizer launched in October, 2011, the company’s site has drawn 100 million unique visitors. Some 80,000 web sites have used Yottaa’s services to date, Wei said. Under the company’s freemium model — site monitoring is free but optimization and security services are not . Yottaa does not disclose how many customers are paying.

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Akamai CEO Paul Sagan at GigaOM Structure

Akamai’s latest product launch lets network operators take over their own content delivery networks, using Akamai’s software but not its boxes. The Aura network solutions business is a huge change in Akamai’s business, given that it has spent more than a decade pushing its proprietary boxes located inside carrier networks. The shift, and the reason for it, offers a lot of clues about the evolution and domestication of the worldwide web.

Akamai, which was founded in 1998, was created with the radical business plan that by caching web content close to the end user, it could deliver movies, videos and websites faster for its customers. Part of the idea was that the content wouldn’t have as far to travel once a user requested it, but another benefit was that by caching content at the edge, content providers and ISPs won because fat files didn’t travel repeatedly across the network. Akamai has tens of thousands of servers at operators around the world and generated sales of $1.16 billion in 2011. The model worked.

A changing web and more competition

But two things happened that have led to Akamai’s shift in strategy. The content sent over the network started changing. Websites turned to downloaded video and then downloads turned to streaming video. And with the advent of apps and widgets, websites became more dynamic, forcing content delivery networks to update their caches faster and from a variety of sources. And still sites bogged down.

Akamai has been on a buying spree, trying to address these issues and the spread of content that blossomed on the web unrelated to delivering video and fat web pages, such as social commenting tools or dynamic ads. It has ventured into mobile advertising, transactional optimization and security.

At the core, though, was Akamai’s EdgePlatform of more than 100,000 servers. But operators, concerned about their bottom lines and the growth of traffic coming from video and monetized by companies that were earning a premium on their pipes, began experimenting with their own CDNs. In both wireline and wireless, ISPs were trying to push Akamai out so they could control their own destiny. (Seriously, I’ve had an executive at an ISP explain its CDN efforts that way.)

With today’s Aura product launch, which offers operators a chance to license Akamai’s software or lets them buy blade servers from network equipment vendor Ericsson that will run Akamai’s software, Akamai has given in to operators’ concerns and the reality of the web. Sure, it was once a huge advantage to have a network of servers at the edge, but plenty of CDNs work very differently now, from Akamai’s rival LimeLight to newer companies such as EdgeCast, which already licenses its software.

Plus, Akamai spends a lot of money on servers, which adds to its bottom line in a business where the price of the base service is decreasing.

Did Akamai just take sides in the taming of the web?

I also see this as an admission that in order to deliver content at a large scale, you’re going to have to get in bed with the carriers. That could be bad news for the likes of Netflix (and the Internet at large). This move takes what used to be a third-party content delivery system and gives carriers the option to control it. Frank Childs, a director of product marketing for the networks business at Akamai, explained that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Hypothetically speaking, he explained that Netflix might benefit under this sort of arrangement because it could work with particular ISPs to ensure its content arrives using the most efficient route for the ISPs, giving Netflix users a better experience and perhaps saving Netflix some bandwidth costs. Childs also suggested the ISP would benefit because it could route the traffic most efficiently for it and possibly monetize traffic it previously hadn’t been able to earn money from.

But Childs also acknowledged that in some cases the product will cause channel conflict for some customers. For example, if you are Disney, do you work with Akamai as your CDN or with carriers? What if you negotiate CDN rates along with the retransmission fees you are already discussing with the pay TV side of the house at many ISPs?

At the same time, if you are Netflix, do you want to work with two or three CDNs, or do you want to negotiate with dozens of carriers in the markets where you want to deliver content? Consider also that those CDNs are willing to fight some pretty public battles with ISPs to protect your and their business.

As for Akamai’s product, it will be followed up with more announcements from Akamai throughout this year as the company seeks to continue adapting its business to the needs of the web. Call it realpolitik, or maybe just business.

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Global broadband providers AT&T, Comcast, Free Telecom (which has been very much in the news of late), KDDI, Internode, Time Warner Cable and XS4ALL will form the ISP contingent; Cisco Systems and D-Link will represent the equipment makers; and Facebook, Google, Microsoft’s Bing and Yahoo will make up the Web delegation. According to a statement from society chief Internet office Leslie Daigle:

The fact that leading companies across several industries are making significant commitments to participate in World IPv6 Launch is yet another indication that IPv6 is no longer a lab experiment; it’s here and is an important next step in the Internet’s evolution. And, as there are more IPv6 services, it becomes increasingly important for companies to accelerate their own deployment plans.

Of course, the Internet Society won’t just flip and switch and convert the world to longer IP addresses, but the organization said it wanted to build on last year’s World IPv6 day, by rather theatrically marking the permanent transition of some of the world’s biggest IP properties to the new protocol. The broadband ISPs have promised that by June 6, 1 percent of their residential customers will be accessing the websites, where possible, via IPv6. Cisco and D-Link will make IPv6 the default settings for their home routers, and the websites will permanently enable the protocol on their main webpages. Akamai and Limelight will also recruit other websites to join the initiative, by implementing IPv6 throughout their content delivery networks.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ADoseofShipBoy

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As the web scales and bandwidth demands rise, finding ways to deliver faster content is pushed out to the edge of networks, because the aggregated demand at the core would be too much to support and would add delays in delivering content. The Speed Up effort tries to take this another step further by making sure a user’s request for a content goes to a server near her, making delivery faster and more efficient from a bandwidth perspective.

At the center of the partnership between DNS providers and participating CDNs is the creation of a standard that attached location data to a DNS request so a user’s request for content goes to server nearby. Typically, a CDN or content provider routes a user based on the address of the DNS server, as opposed to the user’s location, but they aren’t always in the same region.

So now a user in Austin, Texas who types in the URL for a YouTube video will share part of his IP address as part of the DNS request. That way, the domain name system server can route the request to a Google data center in Dallas, as opposed to one in Ireland. It’s a simple idea, but it could result in faster access to content for ISPs and CDNs that elect to implement the open source code that makes this possible. David Ulevitch, CEO of Open DNS says the standard has been submitted to the IETF, but has not been ratified. The IETF is a standards body that governs protocols for the Internet.

For now, only users of Google’s Public DNS service, OpenDNS and Verisign will send out DNS information with a snippet of information gleaned from the user’s IP address. That will help the domain name servers that direct traffic around the web to send that traffic the closest provider. As for privacy concerns about attaching IP addresses to a DNS request, Ulevitch says the information only goes to companies that would see the IP address in a typical HTTP web request, so it’s not sharing any more information than is typical.

On Tuesday, when the new code is implemented, the 30 million Open DNS users and Google’s Public DNS service users visiting content hosted on the participating CDNs will immediately benefit. Ulevitch didn’t have a sense of how much improvement users might expect, although he did say it wouldn’t get worse for anyone. He hopes ISPs will also adopt the standard as well as more content delivery networks. Right now, Edgecast, Contendo, BitGravity and a few others are on board, but leaders such as Limelight or Akamai are not.

So perhaps this could be the beginning of an open effort to improve the web, or perhaps it becomes another niche effort that makes web sites a bit faster for a few people when they visit selected sites. With Google on board, however, that’s still a lot of sites.

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Akamai CEO Paul Sagan

Update: When it comes to consumers watching YouTube or even streaming TV through a Boxee, the assumption is that aside from some buffering or pauses while the streams catch up, the experience will be fine. But when we add live content and interactive elements to those video streams, it gets complicated. Thanks, to a paper detailing Akamai’s content delivery network in minute detail, we can see exactly how complicated it is today, and what sort of havoc interactivity might wreak.

In an academic paper written by researchers at Akamai, Harvard and the University of Massachusetts, readers get an in-depth look at how Akamai’s distributed CDN works, how the web itself works, and what the shift from static to interactive content means for content providers and the network itself. Details such as Akamai’s 61,000 servers located across 70 countries and nearly 1,000 networks pale in comparison to the section on how streaming video is going to get much more challenging in the coming years. Updated: Akamai emailed to say this paper was published last year and since then it now has more than 90,000 servers in more than 1,800 locations in 1,000 networks in more than 70 countries.

The paper offers up a timeline of big web streaming events, beginning with Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote in 2001 that drew 35,500 viewers and required 5.3 gigabytes Gbps of capacity. President Obama’s inauguration in 2009 drew 7 million simultaneous streams and required nearly 2 terabytes Tbps of capacity. Akamai noted it hit a peak record in 2010 of delivering 3.45 Tbps of data. But those numbers don’t keep Akamai engineers up at night. The future does. From the paper:

In the near term (two to five years), it is reasonable to expect that throughput requirements for some single video events will reach roughly 50 to 100 Tbps (the equivalent of distributing a TV quality stream to a large prime time audience). This is an order of magnitude larger than the biggest online events today. The functionality of video events has also been increasing to include such features as DVR-like-functionality (where some clients may pause or rewind), interactivity, advertisement insertion, and mobile device support.

At this scale, it is no longer sufficient to simply have enough server and egress bandwidth resources. One must consider the throughput of the entire path from encoders to servers to end users. The bottleneck is no longer likely to be at just the origin data center. It could be at a peering point, or a network‘s backhaul capacity, or an ISP‘s upstream connectivity—or it could be due to the network latency between server and end user, as discussed earlier in Section 3. At video scale, a data center‘s nominal egress capacity has very little to do with its real throughput to end users.

The paper goes on to say that because even an awesome data center can only provider a few hundred gigabytes per second of throughput to end users, it’s almost impossible to create a service with the scale to deliver the hundreds of terabytes needed to support video. And while the paper reads like a highly technical advertisement for Akamai (and why the way it has built out its CDN is superior to other CDNs,) it’s also a pretty detailed look into the complexity of the web.

I know many of us take it for granted that the animated GIFs that once slowed down our GeoCities page load times are now so commonplace we drop them into comment threads, but that’s the beauty of driving ever-faster broadband speeds. Sometimes it’s nice to look behind the curtain and see how our infrastructure is keeping up with the increasingly complicated elements we’re throwing at it.

Hat tip to High Scalability, which featured the paper.

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AT&T took its first step into the content delivery market back in 2008, when it stopped reselling Akamai CDN services and started to branch out on its own. Back then, AT&T announced plans to spend up to $70 million on the infrastructure related to the CDN offering, in an effort to compete against Akamai, Limelight and others. It followed that up with a hybrid online and on-premises offering for enterprises to more efficiently serve video behind the firewall. But it’s making drastic improvements to the available capacity and storage by implementing new third-party CDN software.

A lot appears to be new in this iteration. According to reports, the new CDN offering is based on technology from startup CDN provider Edgecast. Founded in 2006, Edgecast provides its own CDN services directly to online publishers, but it also has built a business of licensing its software to major service providers like Global Crossing and Deutsche Telekom.

While using its own network and server infrastructure, AT&T will be able to use that improved code base to increase capacity by about 3x and increase available storage by about 5x. The company will also offer enhanced mobility solutions for customers targeting mobile web and apps. And while the offering at first will work through AT&T’s 38 Internet data centers around the world, it also has the flexibility to extend those capabilities further into the facilities of of its customers for enhanced enterprise solutions.

For AT&T, the hope is that it can leverage existing relationships with Fortune 1000 companies to grab new enterprise, e-commerce and media clients. For those of us who remember the network provider’s original CDN push, that’s a familiar refrain. But with improved capabilities, the new CDN might be able to fulfill some of the promise that comes with being a globally recognized brand like AT&T.

For the broader telecom industry, the announcement is one more example of a service provider seeking to offer up its own cloud-based content services. For software companies like Edgecast or gear makers like Juniper or Alcatel-Lucent,, greater telco interest in CDN services could provide a big boost to their revenues.

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The state of web content today

As richer, more dynamic, more interactive sites have hit the Web; the existing infrastructure has become insufficient. While high-speed broadband has tried to meet the infrastructure demands of the exploding volume and size of content on the Web, it’s clear that throwing pure infrastructure at the problem isn’t enough.

Two new markets emerged from these challenges: the content delivery network market (CDN) and the application delivery controller market (ADC). Put simply: These are technologies that help make your experience on the web a lot faster, while still using the same infrastructure that has been in place for the past two decades.

Remarkably, those two markets are now struggling to keep up with the explosive growth of the web. Sites are too big, too dynamic, and too rich for our existing infrastructure, and prevailing techniques for optimizing performance.

Today, we’re embarking upon the third major evolution in modern web performance. Web content optimization and acceleration is one of the largest market opportunities in the tech sector today, and it’s going to pave the way for the next major era of the Internet. Without it, innovation gets throttled.

The technologies we’re currently using to speed up the web need to be supercharged. They need extra help. That’s where making sure web content is efficiently delivered comes in. It’s about the conservation of bandwidth and the compression of megabytes, especially on mobile networks.

Four problems you can’t ignore

Most of the web performance challenges we face today can be traced to four basic trends:

1. Third-party content. Any given web site incorporates vast amounts of third-party content. This includes content such as advertisements, widgets and syndicated feeds.
2. Dynamic. Sites are now required to be more dynamic than our infrastructure can handle. Twitter feeds are constantly changing, and the data can’t be cached, and furthermore, we expect a high degree of personalization and individually relevant experiences when we visit sites.
3. More, more, more. We’re experiencing a content explosion: Sites have more pages, more pictures and more videos packed into the pages than ever before.
4. New devices. Myriad new devices hit the market every month, all of which are Internet-enabled. This doesn’t just mean more laptops and iPads; we’re also talking about refrigerators, low-cost home security cameras, and even cars!

And why is this happening? There’s a new party in town, and its called social media. Our problems aren’t capacity problems; it’s just that our content delivery infrastructure wasn’t designed for what’s happening. The existing infrastructure is designed on three premises and assumptions:

1. Single origin. Most content will originate from the same web servers, so if these are working properly, then everything is good.
2. Static content. Most information will stay the same, and therefore can be cached across the data center and Internet.
3. Fast delivery. Because content comes from a single origin and doesn’t change, caching and route optimization can deliver everything quickly.

Social media turns these assumptions on their heads. Content is mashed-up, syndicated, streamed from everywhere — with different qualities of service. So even if you’re paying $500,000 for traditional performance solutions, your pages will still slow down to the lowest common denominator, such as a slow ad service or the slower speeds of a streamed page from Facebook.

Yes, we can build new infrastructure, but it will take too long, and it may not be enough. We can throw more of the same performance technology at it, but this only helps so much, and the traditional technology doesn’t do anything for today’s dynamic content, which can’t be cached. At the end of the day, these four factors have driven intense demand for a new type of web acceleration.

With our powers combined, we are …

The good news is that we have the technology to solve the problem, and there has already been a good deal of investment to put the wheels in motion. We’re seeing the many web performance players converge to do this.

Recently, Limelight Networks acquired AcceloWeb for up to a rumored $20 million in a cash and stock deal. AcceloWeb’s technology does precisely what I’ve hinted at so far: It accelerates web content so that it can travel faster over our existing Internet infrastructure. Limelight, a traditional CDN company, is making a large investment in Web content optimization and acceleration. These are two fundamentally different markets converging under one company, yet we hardly heard any talk about the strategy behind the investment.

Similarly, Google recently announced that Google Analytics now offers a Site Speed Analytics Report. It was greeted with applause from the web performance community, but nobody really heard about how this “feature” had much broader implications for the web.

Google isn’t just helping you measure your site’s speed; they want the Web to be lightning fast. It’s critical to the future of their business that the web isn’t crippled by performance woes.

Their revenue is still largely ad-based, which contribute costly seconds to load times if we don’t find a solution. Not to mention: The faster a site loads, the more ads Google can serve. Google cares about web performance because it’s absolutely critical to their business and the future of the web itself.

Just how big is this?

This isn’t just the market opportunity for web content acceleration that’s exciting here. What’s more important is the future of the web, and what this evolution in web performance will spawn.

We’re talking about webscale personalization that isn’t held back by performance problems. Personalization is the web topic du jour, but we’re not going to reach the promise of true web personalization if we can’t load web pages faster than we’re doing on average today.

Similarly, the mobile web is going to face major obstacles if we can’t tune our apps to perform on even the most troubled networks. And we sure as heck aren’t going to usher in the future of virtual personal assistants if we can’t conduct complex processing and deliver that content at the speeds that consumers demand.

Oddly enough, the success or failure of these sexy technologies hinges on a critical evolution in web performance. All of a sudden, the emerging web acceleration and content optimization market is starting to look a lot sexier to investors, entrepreneurs and incumbent technology companies alike.

Ed Robinson is the CEO of Aptimize, a company that produces software to accelerate websites.

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