Federated CDNs: What every service provider should know

What Every Service Provider Should Know About

Federated CDNs

Introduction
The concept of federated content delivery networks (CDNs) presents telecommunications
service providers with an unprecedented opportunity to compete directly with market
leaders like Akamai and Limelight in the global CDN arena.

This opportunity is particularly appealing because service providers currently find
themselves trapped in a cost-revenue squeeze. While historical revenue sources shrink,
they are forced to invest in costly infrastructure upgrades to accommodate soaring online
video traffic; investments that they cannot recoup beyond modest consumer internet
access fees.

Many telcos, ISPs and cable providers have already begun to address this problem by
launching their own regional CDNs as a means to reduce network video transport costs
and create new revenue sources.

But while service providers can capitalize on inherent home field advantages with their
localized CDNs — cost advantages and deep caching that come from owning the network
all the way to the user’s premises — they cannot currently parlay them beyond their
home turf. Grabbing a piece of the prized global content delivery business will require
that these service providers ally, combine operations and marketing muscle and provide
content owners with “one stop shopping.”

However, executing this vision is extremely challenging.

Consider the complexity of managing a network across multiple infrastructure operators,
technology platforms, sales organizations, geographies, market segments, and business
models. Managing across all of these dimensions demands the ability to measure them
individually and in aggregate. This, in turn, demands a powerful reporting and analytics
hub that can handle enormous volumes and high dimensionality.

Such multi-dimensional analysis is critical to solving management problems of a single,
localized CDN; the need only escalates in importance as CDN interconnection adds further
dimensions and spawns questions like:

• Which federation members actually delivered content to end users and how much?

• Did multiple federation members participate in relaying content from its sources to
the delivering edge servers?

• Which members sold CDN services to or "own the relationships with" the content
owners/customers?

With this white paper, we will reveal how it is now possible to establish a central reporting
repository that gathers data across all content owners and federation members, while also
providing secure, private views of data relevant only to each participant – and how such an
analytical hub can drive the success of a CDN federation.

IP Video Management Analytics 1

The Opportunity
Many service providers are building their own CDNs to extricate themselves from the cost -
revenue bind created by shrinking landline revenues and rising online video traffic. Doing
so can both alleviate the strain on their network backbone and create new revenue sources.

Those telcos, ISPs and cable companies that embrace this strategy will reap tangible
dividends. They will no longer be dependent on third-party content delivery providers
and, in fact, can compete with pure-play CDNs at a regional level by offering lower costs
and better quality of service (QoS).

Service providers cannot currently compete against these pure-play CDNs on a truly global
basis, though. It is just too inconvenient and inefficient for large content owners to
contract with scores of individual providers in order to cover their entire target footprint.
Cobbling together a network in such a patchwork fashion would be a logistical nightmare.
By federating to establish a “one stop shopping” value proposition, however, localized
CDNs can compete effectively against the content delivery kingpins.

1. One Stop Shopping

Service providers can win against pure-play CDNs by creating a unified customer experience
while insulating customers from the underlying complexity of a federated CDN.

Localized Service Provider CDN Federated Service Provider CDN
Disadvantages for Content Owners Advantages for Content Owners
who have global audiences who have global audiences

Many different reports in different formats One set of reports covering the entire
and different levels of detail that must be operation
integrated to get a true view of global
operations.

Inefficiencies and additional costs that come Single contract
from negotiating lots of separate contracts

Myriad bills from myriad providers Billing from a single source

Hassle of validating varying service level Single SLA to validate
agreements (SLAs)

Separate log-ins, authentication and training Central access and procedures

Separate contact for every problem that arises Centralized contact for maintenance and support

Multiple points of content ingestion using Single integration to content management
different integration methods system


2. More Reliable, Higher Quality Video Delivery

Federation members can also offer content owners consistently high quality video delivery
across the globe. This can create an important competitive advantage versus pure play
CDNs – particularly as online video moves into the living room and customers demand
increasingly higher levels of video quality.

By delivering video close to the end customer, service providers can offer QoS guarantees to
content owners. In return, content owners and IPTV services can charge their customers for
HD video programming that is comparable to that of cable and satellite pay TV services. The
more reliable, high quality picture resolution also becomes a more appealing environment
for advertisers, who want to showcase their products and services in the best possible setting.

By interconnecting CDNs, service providers can cache content deeply not only in their
networks but also in those of other participating networks. This allows a service provider
to offer content owners the same local quality advantages everywhere, creating a global
edge.


The Challenge
Significant obstacles remain in the way of bringing the federated CDN concept to life,
however; none so substantial as the sheer operational and management complexity involved
in deploying such a coalition.

Consider a sampling of the variables at play:

1. Cost Allocation: Complex rules and processes must be
established to determine which member companies
incur costs under what circumstances and at what
rate.
For instance, how is cost allocated when a request
is generated in Spain for a video asset that
originates in England?
• Does the content get ingested in England into the
content owner’s CDN and then get transmitted
through the federated network to the streaming
servers of a service provider in Spain?
• Or does the content get ingested directly into the Spanish network?

2. Revenue Allocation: Similar rules and processes must also be put in place to determine
how revenue is allocated among member companies.
• How will monies collected from content owners be distributed among federation
members?
• If a content owner was sold the federated content delivery by service provider A but the
content is delivered by service provider B, who gets what cut of the revenue? This
may be complicated since CDN charges are often not linear in the amount of content
delivered (e.g. they may be based on peak or 95th percentile traffic).

3. Routing: Establishing the methodology and mechanisms for determining routing decisions
also introduces notable complexity. This may be especially problematic in “vertical”
federations (wherein multiple members serve the same geography) and is intimately tied
up with cost allocation.
• To what peered CDN are content requests redirected?
• Is routing prioritized based on the proximity of a server to the end user or by available
server capacity?
• What if certain operators choose not to federate with every other member? How would
exceptions be handled? For instance, CDN A may sell services to content owners on the
basis that they may be delivered by federation members B, C, D and E … but not by F or G.
But CDN G may sell services on the basis that they may be delivered by any service
provider, including CDN A.


4. Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Each federation member defines and guarantees the
level of service to its customers but these will likely vary from operator to operator.

• How can participating members assure that SLAs are always met?

• How would this be validated to content owners and aggregators?

• Who is responsible for remedies in case of failures, particularly when they are statistical
in nature and not easily attributable to specific incidents?

For example, suppose that a federation customer has its content ultimately delivered by
three different service providers but that 80% of it is delivered through just one of
these. The customer may get its highest success percentage with the provider that
serves the highest absolute number of failures (the 80% operator). If the customer’s
SLA percentage is not met, is the penalty divided up based on number of failures or on
failure rate?

5. Billing: Each federation member is likely to have different billing and collection
procedures, practices and technologies. These are but a few of the billing challenges
that arise when exploring CDN federation.

• How are they made compatible with one another?

• How are discrepancies reconciled?

• Importantly, how is the customer presented with a single, seamless billing experience?

6. Confidentiality: While federation members are allied, they are still separate companies
and may compete on some level. A key challenge exists in how to enable participating
members to share resources but still conceal proprietary internal details from one
another. Regulatory requirements (anti-trust and pro-competition measures, as well
as privacy legislation) may further constrain how data is to be handled. In some cases, it
might even be necessary to operate a federation without any one entity being able to
see 100% of the full picture.


The Solution
Surmounting these many operational and management challenges requires a high degree of
standardization and integration among federated service providers. Ultimately, the content
delivery process needs to work across service providers as seamlessly as international voice calling.

One approach to integrating some of the necessary processes includes a portfolio of
centralized “shared services” that every participant can utilize. A key example of such a
shared service is a reporting and analytics “exchange.”

Such an exchange could function as a central repository that gathers disparate data of
varying formats from across the federation value chain. Fundamental to this repository
would be the means to aggregate and process huge volumes of CDN data and — importantly
— to provide the appropriate level of visibility to this data among the federation participants.
This could include the CDNs, content owners, syndicators (content retailers like Netflix),
and resellers.

Data in
Federation
format 1
Operator
Service Data View
Provider 1 Connector 1

Data in
format 2 Federation
Member
Service Data Operations
Provider 2 Connector 2 View

Common
Data Model Federation
Member
Marketing
View
Data in
format n
Service Data
Content
Provider n Connector n Owner View

Key requirements for a reporting and analytics exchange deployed in a major CDN federation are:

• Multiple input formats: The reporting and analytics exchange must be able to process
inputs from multiple CDNs, each of which may use a different technology platform and
produce different types of logs or data extracts. The exchange must be able to normalize
all of these formats into a common data model that represents the most important
analytical elements for CDN operators and their content owner end customers.


• Scale: Any individual CDN would likely produce such high-volume, high-velocity data
that it would overwhelm any conventional business intelligence or data warehousing
technology. The challenge of quickly generating rich, detailed business insights becomes
exponentially greater in a global, multi-CDN environment.

• Multidimensionality: CDN management involves a great many data attributes. Creating a
federation only adds more to these (serving member, selling member, etc.). The reporting
exchange must be sufficiently powerful to handle this dimensionality and to preserve it,
even while serving up insights in near-real time.

• Multiple means of presenting data: Different federation members will want to access the
shared reporting repository in different ways.

• Some will want to use standardized dashboards provided by the exchange.

• Others will want to display the data in their own customized dashboards.

• Still others will want data loaded into their own OSS/BSS or similar internal
management systems.

Therefore, the reporting and analytics exchange must be able to display data not only in
a full-featured set of packaged dashboards but also through various APIs that allow both
pushing and pulling of data into other systems.

• Security: While all of the data about the federation’s operations would be brought into
a centralized, shared database, it is critical that no member be able to see data that
doesn’t pertain to their specific business and operations. This requires a solid, secure,
“hack free” technology platform that has proven itself in similar scenarios.

• Multiple views of data: A content owner needs to view reports that capture the entire
consumption pattern of the content, regardless of which member CDNs ultimately deliver
it. Meanwhile, a federation member needs to see reports containing all of the data that
pertains to its business – whether that means all of the traffic that this member delivered
or all of the traffic originated by content owners for which this CDN is the vendor of record.

Additional views may be required for subsidiaries or divisions of the member companies or
for business partners that resell for one or more of the member CDNs. As such, the reporting
and analytics exchange must offer multiple standard views for different entity types, as
well as the flexibility to build out new views to address evolving business requirements.

• Flexibility: It is difficult enough to get one software application to completely meet
the needs of a single customer. It will be even more difficult to fully satisfy the needs of
all members of a CDN federation. Therefore, the underlying platform must be flexible
and extensible enough to accommodate new requirements that might arise. These
requirements could include new input data formats, new data attributes, new metrics,
new reports, new views and so forth. A reporting and analytics hub must therefore
include enough extensibility to evolve in any such direction.


A reporting and analytics exchange that meets these requirements can address many of the
major challenges of federated CDNs in the following ways:

• Cost Allocation: By quantifiably pinpointing “who does
what for whom,” the reporting and analytics exchange
can provide an objective analysis of each federation
participant’s contribution to the overall load.

• Revenue Allocation: Similarly, the exchange can
quantify each member’s slice of the revenue pie based
on customer relationships, delivery activities, or any
other rule or criterion.

• Routing: By highlighting bottlenecks and sources of errors, a reporting and analytics
exchange can help to optimize network topology and, in turn, help member companies
to maximize capacity and address service quality issues.

• Service Level Agreements: By measuring performance of various factors in aggregate, as
well as broken out by specific members, the exchange can help members to comply with
each other’s SLAs.

• Cofidentiality: A central repository can be configured with rules and permissions so
that individual federation members are able to access data relevant only to them, while
denying wider access to the data of other members. Access can be further segmented
such that each member can view data across its customers or, conversely, that each
customer could view data across participating CDNs.


Conclusion
To become more competitive in the global CDN marketplace, service providers must form
cooperative alliances that interconnect their networks. This will allow them to offer end
users worldwide with video resolution and reliability equivalent to cable and satellite
TV. More importantly, it will enable these providers to package comprehensive content
delivery services as a one-stop-shopping experience to content owners that have large,
geographically distributed audiences.

Failure to do so will limit service provider CDNs to regional players. Cost and quality
advantages may give them an edge over pure-play CDNs in their home markets but limit
their global aspirations unless they federate.

Myriad complexities stand in the way of such a CDN union, however. These include factors
related to cost and revenue allocations, routing, billing and collection, service level
delivery, and security and confidentiality.

Key to overcoming many of these operational and managerial complexities is the ability
to establish a central reporting and analytics hub that can handle large volumes and high
dimensionality, and which provide secure portals for value chain members to access data
specific to their operations.

Skytide Insight for Content Delivery Networks can uniquely support this reporting and
analytics vision because:

• It can process the huge volumes of data that a federation of CDNs would generate —
terabytes per day — and transform it into finished reports in minutes.

• It can handle the complexities inherent with federation because it is powered by the
Skytide Analytical Platform, which is designed for high-volume, high-velocity,
multi-dimensional analytics. So Skytide can provide the level of richness and granularity
necessary to properly allocate costs and revenue, comply with SLAs, and supply the
meaningful insights needed to operate a multi-organizational business.

• It allows service providers to offer the appropriate levels of data visibility at different
points across the digital media supply chain. Telcos, ISPs and cable companies can provide
secure portals to each of their customers, in turn enabling them to access data specific
to their own operations. They can also provide individualized access to business partners
such as resellers, content syndicators or company subsidiaries.

• It is customizable and extensible, and accommodates rapidly evolving business models.

• It is tested tough. Telco CDNs like BT, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Telstra rely on Skytide
to help them isolate and correct service quality issues, forecast and provision capacity,
justify pricing and ensure accurate billing.


Addendum — Case Study
An important Skytide customer operates its CDN globally by managing locally. It delegates
important elements of control in both operational and marketing arenas to national or
regional subsidiaries around the world. Each subsidiary has its own network infrastructure
(POPs) and its own customers; in effect, the CDN as a whole represents a federation of
these subsidiaries.

Just as in a federation of unrelated companies, content belonging to one member’s
customers gets delivered by the infrastructure of other members. In this implementation,
Skytide Insight for Content Delivery Networks captures transactional data in multiple
formats from every subsidiary’s edge servers and translates it into a common data model.
Slices of this data are revealed to stakeholders based on their responsibilities and spans of
control.

• Marketing staff at the subsidiaries can view all content delivery data from customers
with whom they own relationships – regardless of which other subsidiaries might have
ultimately performed the delivery.

• Operational staff at the divisions can view all of the data about transactions delivered via
their organization’s infrastructure – regardless of which subsidiaries own the corresponding
customer relationships.

• The product management team for the global CDN can view everything.

• The Skytide application even provides specific views for resellers that partner with
specific subsidiaries and “co-own” the relationships with certain content providers.

This implementation provides a “laboratory” in which Skytide has isolated and solved some
of the key challenges related to reporting and analytics for CDN federations. These
challenges are the same as those that would be presented by a global, inter-company
federation and we are pleased to have cleared these hurdles in advance, offering a proven
solution for the federation analytics problem.


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