Future of Infrastructure

1
Future of Infrastructure

• Introduction on CDN, P2P Cloud computing

Vincent BONNEAU, Head of Internet Services, IDATE
2
Internet traffic growth is accelerating

• User base still increasing
• Overall growth close to 10 per year in most of
  the advanced countries
• Strong impact of online video consumption
• Close to 100 growth per year (including
  encoding)
• New web applications and tools modifying the
  traditional patterns
• Read-write web (user upload from Web 2.0
  services)
• Distributed web (RSS, APIs, etc)
• With still more to come
• HD video, 3D, etc
• Extended social graph

Online video consumption (USA)
3
and bringing challenges for scalability

• Technical challenges
• Manage the increasing volumes of traffic
• Ensure numerous simultaneous connections
• Financial challenges
• IP transit prices decline is slow and can not
  compensate the traffic growth
• Only a few players (first mile) are getting paid
  for the traffic
• Leading to peering quarrels, bandwidth throttling
  and consumption caps
• Peering is not free (hardware costs) and not
  adapted to video streaming (too asymetrical)

Traffic vs Cost
4
Internet giants develop their own infrastructure
Google servers

• Traditional internal optimisation techniques are
  not enough
• Distributed web services from Amazon
• Open to third parties
• Google reference architecture
• Homegrown low-cost computing platform with
  commodity servers and advanced distributed
  software
• (BigTable, MapReduce, etc)
• Deployment of its own datacenters with more than
  5 billion USD invested in the last 2 years
• Backbone involvment with submarine cable
• Other major players following in the footsteps of
  Amazon and Google

5
giving them critical competitive advantage

• Ensure scalability
• No real off-the-shelf solutions
• Strong performances (uptime, latency) allowing
  better user experience
• Optimise costs
• Bandwidth control
• Energy-efficient solutions
• Faster scaling from opening the infrastructure
• Control and analyse more data
• Future innovations based on large amounts of data
  (translation, scene completion, etc)
• Rather than fined-tuned conceptual models
• Direct impact on monetisation (advertising,
  e-commerce)
• Traffic analysis (audience, advertising)

Scene completion
6
Other solutions for scalability

• Smaller web players can turn to CDN solutions
• Combination of technologies distributed in the
  Internet (caching, load balancing, traffic
  monitoring, etc) for popular content
• Used by most e-commerce (spikes) and online video
  players
• P2P is also an alternative
• Users become servers
• Used by BBC iPlayer, Joost, etc
• Some performance limitations (upload, SLA,
  unoptimised routing, )
• Hybrid approaches with CDN
• Telcos becoming very concerned
• Who is paying for the P2P traffic?
• Development of in-network approach with P4P

Costs for video delivery per Gbps
CDN principles
7
have led to a very dynamic market

• Overall CDN market growth above 50 per year
• Increasing demand from e-commerce and video
• SaaS and professional online applications
• Crowded landscape
• Akamai as the clear leader
• Pressure from specialized players (Limelight,
  CDNetworks, Chinacache, etc)
• 300 million USD invested in the last 18 months
• Telcos reactions
• First moves from telcos on the CDN/P2P market
  (Level3, ATT, Telia) and more recently cloud
  computing (Verizon)
• BT (21st CN API)

CDN P2P World Market
8
Key questions

• What solutions are being used to ensure quality
  of service and scalability, especially for video
  services?
• What impact are the Internet giants cloud
  computing initiatives having on the
  infrastructure?
• As new last-mile technologies are being rolled
  out, how will the rest of the network evolve to
  respond to the rise in distributed traffic and
  who will pay for it?