By Alibaba Cloud CDN Team
Alibaba Cloud recently released a comprehensive map of best practice for Alibaba Cloud CDN in industry applications. This detailed map was designed based on years of practices of Alibaba Cloud CDN in the Alibaba ecosystem, and by considering the requirements of tens of thousands of enterprises on the cloud. For this purpose, this map presents customers' practice of using CDN in three stages, that is, convenient extension, all-in-one distribution, and diversified management. We hope that this map can help customers find and deploy the most suitable path for their own CDN practice.
In this map, Alibaba Cloud introduces the typical scenarios and core technical capabilities of CDN that meet the requirements of different customers. For start-up enterprises and individual developers, CDN supports large file distribution, dynamic and static hybrid acceleration, non-standard protocol transmission, programmable computing, and IPv6 for the comprehensive process. It integrates with cloud services such as Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Server Load Balancer (SLB), Object Storage Service (OSS), and Log Service to help users achieve simple and scalable extensions.
For other customers in different industries, Alibaba Cloud CDN, with its rich practical experience in industrial applications, has accumulated multiple solutions for content delivery in various business scenarios. For example, Alibaba Cloud CDN has been applied to accelerate downloads from application stores and provide secure acceleration for government and enterprise websites. It is also appropriate for e-commerce events such as flash sales, online education, financial scenario, social interaction, game acceleration, and multimedia business.
Based on four core systems, namely, the intelligent scheduling system for traffic computing, distributed cache architecture, intelligent process system, and data intelligence business, Alibaba Cloud CDN is also supported by technologies such as tamper-proofing, security management, live broadcasting that allows high concurrency and low latency, real-time performance monitoring, data science decision-making, and edge security plus cloud protection. By doing so, CDN can help customers handle high concurrency pressure to improve user experience and security in content delivery.
Generally, the booming Internet video business confronts Internet enterprises with several "peak moments" in a year, such as the Spring Festival Gala. To address such video demands, Alibaba Cloud CDN integrates with the Alibaba Group ecosystem to accumulate a wide range of practical experience to help customers deal with traffic peaks in complex scenarios, such as Double 11 flash sale, highly interactive live streaming such as the red envelopes activities in the Spring Festival Gala, and large-scale live streaming scenarios. Alibaba Cloud CDN innovates in technology and service models. It also goes along with specific customer demands. Based on the Serverless programmable computing, the global real-time transmission network (GRTN), as well as the precise and efficient intelligent data science for decision-making system, CDN keeps upgrading its products and services, providing powerful support for system operation and the best access experience for a large number of users.
Wang Binbin, the product manager of Alibaba Cloud CDN, said: "We have built a new CDN distribution network that can perform real-time computing on the edge of the Internet to host customer business. For Alibaba Cloud CDN, 90% of its innovations stem from customer demands. The best practice of CDN is summarized from the perspective of customers worldwide. It is an accumulation of the practical experience of CDN for hundreds of thousands of enterprises on the cloud, covering a large scale of complex scenarios in the Alibaba economy."
Originating from Taobao CDN, Alibaba Cloud CDN has been providing acceleration services for high-traffic e-commerce websites since the Double 11 in 2009. It was first applied and practiced in multiple e-commerce scenarios. Nowadays, Alibaba Cloud has established hundreds of high-quality nodes around the world and possessed excellent bandwidth resources.
In 2011, CDN, as a tool to distribute Internet traffic, was gradually applied to the entire Alibaba Group ecosystem, rather than just the Taobao e-commerce. In 2014, Alibaba Cloud CDN officially announced its commercialization and opened its service capabilities to global enterprises and entrepreneurs. In 2015, Alibaba Cloud CDN joined hands with e-commerce to enter the HTTPS era, and continuously upgraded its in-house scheduling system to cope with the exponentially growing traffic impact.
With the development of mobile Internet, the popularity of video services, and the practice of Double 11 every year, CDN traffic is growing exponentially. In 2017, Alibaba Cloud CDN launched its globalization strategy and successively released products such as Software Defined Cloud Networking (SDCN) and Dynamic Route for Content Delivery Network (DCDN). The product matrix was comprehensively upgraded. At the beginning of 2018, in the Market Guide for CDN Services published by Gartner, Alibaba Cloud was identified as a global service provider for its global service capabilities and technical advantages.
In recent years, Alibaba Cloud CDN has been continuously working on its product technologies around "intelligence" and "computability", and has continued to improve its Serverless, multi-dimensional load balancing features for workload, scientific decision-making in various edge application scenarios. As a result, Alibaba Cloud CDN has won customers' trust for its high-efficiency service and high-quality user experience. As the application of Alibaba Cloud CDN increases, the peak traffic scale of CDN has kept breaking its record. So far, Alibaba Cloud CDN provides more than 2,800 nodes and 130 TB bandwidth reserves around the world, providing acceleration services for more than millions of domain names using by hundreds of thousands of enterprises worldwide.
Alibaba Cloud CDN has also built an ecological network to connect end-users around the world. During late peak hours, the network processes hundreds of millions of connection queries per second (QPS) and delivers billions of configuration management directives to all nodes every day.
With hundreds of thousands of enterprise customers on the cloud, the rich ecosystem applications of Alibaba, and a global infrastructure network, Alibaba Cloud CDN has been widely used in multiple scenarios, such as entertainment, e-commerce, games, sports, finance, governments, and enterprises.
During the 2018 World Cup in Russia, CDN hosted 70% of the network-wide traffic and supported 24 million times online watching on Youku. During the Double 11 in 2019, Alibaba Cloud CDN provided an excellent viewing experience of 4K and a frame freezing rate of less than 2% to 51.44 million audience.
At the same time, CDN also ensured a good e-commerce interactive experience during the traffic peak of tens of millions of QPS. In the first half of 2020 when the outbreak of Covid-19 urged the explosive growth of Internet services, Alibaba Cloud CDN enabled online office and online education by promoting DingTalk video conferencing, a national cloud platform for primary and secondary education, and VIPKID (an online teaching platform) to ensure a smooth, real-time, interactive watching experience. As thus, Alibaba Cloud CDN ensured continuity in education and work for hundreds of millions of people, initiating the era of online real-time video interaction.
Under the background of accelerated digital transformation in the post-epidemic era, Alibaba Cloud CDN is aimed at helping customers in finance, media, government, and enterprise industries resist the risk of cyber attacks and ensuring highly available, secure, and qualified online services. To this end, Alibaba Cloud CDN combines its rich practical experience on government cloud and financial cloud to customize a secure acceleration solution for government and enterprise. For example, media companies, such as CCTV.com, apply multiple CDN encryption modes for transmission to protect content from hijacking and tampering over the comprehensive process. Also, the content security and encryption techniques help improve the security of copyrighted video programs during transmission and playback.
In addition, with its excellent performance, core video technology, and rich practical experience, Alibaba Cloud CDN has guaranteed the live streaming of multiple major events, such as the New Year's Eve, the Spring Festival Gala, the Asian Games, the League of Legends World Championship, the CBA, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2020, and the Double 11 every year.
Years of experience and development have made Alibaba Cloud CDN the mainstay of its own field. Currently, with the emergence of 5G and IoT technology, as well as the digital transformation, the feature of CDN will evolve from content delivery to value delivery, making CDN a powerful driving force for enterprises to improve efficiency, optimize operations, and achieve intelligent applications. In this situation, the map of the best practices of CDN can be the best assistant for millions of enterprises to deliver content and value, promoting innovation and development in more emerging industry scenarios.
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