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  1. #1
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    OnApp CDN Feedback

    Hi all,

    We've setup an OnApp CDN node and are testing it out.

    Just wondering if others have put much traffic on their own nodes and/or the global federation, and what kind of results you are seeing with performance.

    One thing I'm really curious about is how good the detection is to route users to the geographically closest node.

    I'm just starting testing and will post results in the next few days.

  2. #2
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    We've been using the Federation for a few months and I have to say I haven't heard of any complaints from our customers. We use it to host our main sites static content and from our various tests from different geographic locations the route detection has been spot on.

  3. #3
    I've been waiting to see some reviews of the OnAPP CDN since they released it, sadly there isn't a ton of info out there yet. Looking forward to seeing how it goes for you.

    Keep us updated.

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  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by MannDude View Post
    I've been waiting to see some reviews of the OnAPP CDN since they released it, sadly there isn't a ton of info out there yet. Looking forward to seeing how it goes for you.

    Keep us updated.

    /subscribed
    I think it is quite ok for normal user.
    But don't try to compare it with Edgecast, internap or Akamei CDN. There is still a lot to improve.

  5. #5
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    Quote Originally Posted by aky007 View Post
    I think it is quite ok for normal user.
    But don't try to compare it with Edgecast, internap or Akamei CDN. There is still a lot to improve.
    We don't really compete with them, it's totally different customer segment. We are going after the same market as Cloudfront / MaxCDN.

  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by aky007 View Post
    I think it is quite ok for normal user.
    But don't try to compare it with Edgecast, internap or Akamei CDN. There is still a lot to improve.
    Just wondering, what is to improve? Latency? Accuracy of PoPs? or are you specifically pointing at Web Site acceleration services offered by those company?

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by iwod View Post
    Just wondering, what is to improve? Latency? Accuracy of PoPs? or are you specifically pointing at Web Site acceleration services offered by those company?
    Yepp.. Almost all you listed needed to be improve. But like what Onapp Staff say they are totally different customer segment.

    LOL

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by aky007 View Post
    Yepp.. Almost all you listed needed to be improve. But like what Onapp Staff say they are totally different customer segment.

    LOL
    Huh? How are they different or targeting different markets? Because they handle DNS/Anycast differently? Fewer edge locations? They're still targeting the same market aren't they? I was looking at OnApp as an easy way to setup a CDN service and start offering CDN to our clients... an alternative to some of the higher priced stuff out there. Is this not the case?

  9. #9
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    HTTP caching is definitely fine, just that certain features are tailored towards high end customers that aren't so much required by mass market. Segmenting customer group would basically help us to be focused in building functionalities that are tailored to mass market.

    In terms of PoPs, we've in excess of 65 PoPs worldwide, so we are pretty distributed, and in fact it's our strength.

  10. #10
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    Apart from Akamai, i dont think there are any CDN that has more PoPs.

    ( They properly have more servers and capacity, but not locations )

    So apart from Software, it does stand a good chance to beat out others.

  11. #11
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    I spoke too soon, indeed the Latency really needs some working on.

  12. #12
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    Mind elaborating it? Drop me a mail on that at whei.wong@onapp.com, will look into it.

  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by iwod View Post
    I spoke too soon, indeed the Latency really needs some working on.
    I will recommend you to disclose the result so we can learn more and understand more about OnAPP CDN

  14. #14
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    Quote Originally Posted by iwod View Post
    I spoke too soon, indeed the Latency really needs some working on.
    I am also interested in your experience/results, please do share
    Thanks,

    Brendan Diaz
    Connect: linkedin.com/in/brendandiaz

  15. #15
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    One of my questions about these federated CDNs is how is performance guaranteed and what are the SLAs, if any? I don't know much about MaxCDN, but I do know CloudFront offers an SLA (though it's not great in comparison to the pure play CDN vendors). I suppose you could use a multi CDN strategy with a cheap, federated CDN and then a backup, more expensive traditional CDN to fill in any performance gaps, and use something like Dyn's CDN Manager or 3Crowd's CrowdDirector to manage it, but that's a layer of complexity (and cost) that's probably only warranted for larger customers.

    Edit: It looks like 3Crowd now has a federated CDN offering very similar to OnApp CDN, called XDN. I do know of another company, Jet-Stream, that has a federated CDN product, but it seems more popular in Europe and is being targeted at telcos, not hosting companies. Looks like this segment is heating up--it will be interesting to see how much, if any, pricing pressure these offerings will put on traditional CDN operators.
    Last edited by lockbull; 04-24-2012 at 03:03 AM. Reason: Additional info

  16. #16
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    Here are my thoughts from testing out OnApp CDN so far:

    Quote Originally Posted by lockbull View Post
    One of my questions about these federated CDNs is how is performance guaranteed and what are the SLAs, if any?
    There are certainly no strict SLAs with it. But, they do enforce specific hardware requirements in order for an Edge Server to be accepted into the global federation.

    The dashboard mentions they do passive monitoring of the edge server every 10 seconds, and active monitoring every 60 seconds. So, hopefully an edge server failure is detected quickly and automatically taken out of service.

    Other notes from testing:

    Terminology and documentation has a lot of room for improvement. For example, they use the word "publisher" in the global dashboard to describe something called an "edge resource" in another place.

    Setup was a little bit tricky. I followed the documentation, but had to get OnApp support to fix two things that I couldn't figure out from the docs. (#1 - cdn edge node template was not installed and #2 - my custom domain somehow just "didnt work")

    The backbone of a CDN is the DNS infrastructure. So, to use the OnApp CDN you have to trust and use their DNS. I've done some testing on their anycast dns network and it works OK. Performance is not as good as DNSMadeEasy but they did take traceroutes from me in order to attempt improvement. However, during testing I noticed that one of their authoritative DNS servers was broken (not answering any dns queries) which was concerning. That was fixed within a few hours of reporting the problem.

    Interfaces are still a little bit clunky since they are merging Aflexi stuff in with new stuff they are developing. For example, if you want to subscribe to another CDN node in the federation it takes 3 steps in 2 different systems: 1) subscribe in the global dashboard 2) edit your cdn edge group to include it and 3) edit and re-save your CDN "site" (a.k.a. CDN Resource). the 3rd step was not intuitive and I had to contact support to figure that out.

    When you create a new CDN Resource, it takes "15-20 minutes" until it will work, according to support ticket 388327. This is not documented and counter to the "Status: Active" that the control panel shows you.

    As a provider, you can't deploy edge servers in multiple geographic locations unless you also have a OnApp cloud deployed there. I wanted to add a edge server in another location, but that would require 2 physical boxes and $140/mo in OnApp fees. They said that is something they want to allow but not in the next few months.

    Routing requests from clients to the Edge Servers works pretty well but I need to do more testing. It seems that the request will pretty much always go to an edge server in the same *country* however in the US, my requests do not go to the geographically closest edge server. It would be nice if they had documentation about how their request routing worked.


    Interested in hearing what other providers think of it ...
    Last edited by TQ Mark; 04-25-2012 at 01:42 PM. Reason: clarification

  17. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by lockbull View Post
    One of my questions about these federated CDNs is how is performance guaranteed and what are the SLAs, if any? I don't know much about MaxCDN, but I do know CloudFront offers an SLA (though it's not great in comparison to the pure play CDN vendors). I suppose you could use a multi CDN strategy with a cheap, federated CDN and then a backup, more expensive traditional CDN to fill in any performance gaps, and use something like Dyn's CDN Manager or 3Crowd's CrowdDirector to manage it, but that's a layer of complexity (and cost) that's probably only warranted for larger customers.
    Cloudfront started without any SLA, and introduced that lately. We will be doing something similar in steps too.

  18. #18
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    Terminology and documentation has a lot of room for improvement. For example, they use the word "publisher" in the global dashboard to describe something called an "edge resource" in another place.
    Ah hah, we will fix the terminology.

    Setup was a little bit tricky. I followed the documentation, but had to get OnApp support to fix two things that I couldn't figure out from the docs. (#1 - cdn edge node template was not installed and #2 - my custom domain somehow just "didnt work")
    Template should be a syncing issue, I'll ask our dev about that.

    As for custom domain, is this fixed? Do you have a ticket? Need to check on that. I suspect it could be some capitalized letter in the domain and our strict checking system rejected it because we only support lowercase, but this is now improved.

    The backbone of a CDN is the DNS infrastructure. So, to use the OnApp CDN you have to trust and use their DNS. I've done some testing on their anycast dns network and it works OK. Performance is not as good as DNSMadeEasy but they did take traceroutes from me in order to attempt improvement. However, during testing I noticed that one of their authoritative DNS servers was broken (not answering any dns queries) which was concerning. That was fixed within a few hours of reporting the problem.
    Thank you for the feedback, we will attempt to improve the latency in the coming weeks.
    Interfaces are still a little bit clunky since they are merging Aflexi stuff in with new stuff they are developing. For example, if you want to subscribe to another CDN node in the federation it takes 3 steps in 2 different systems: 1) subscribe in the global dashboard 2) edit your cdn edge group to include it and 3) edit and re-save your CDN "site" (a.k.a. CDN Resource). the 3rd step was not intuitive and I had to contact support to figure that out.
    Yes, we will have tighter integration in coming releases so that you don't have to do the 3rd step. And hopefully we can automate 2nd step as much as possible.
    When you create a new CDN Resource, it takes "15-20 minutes" until it will work, according to support ticket 388327. This is not documented and counter to the "Status: Active" that the control panel shows you.
    Configuration will take up to 5mins to populate to all edge servers. Designed to populate close to real time, but normally we suggest to wait for 5 mins.

    Routing requests from clients to the Edge Servers works pretty well but I need to do more testing. It seems that the request will pretty much always go to an edge server in the same *country* however in the US, my requests do not go to the geographically closest edge server. It would be nice if they had documentation about how their request routing worked.
    DNS redirection - we detect your NS IP instead of your connection IP, so if your NS is sitting on West coast, while you are on East, most probably you'll be sent to a West coast server. We are developing EDNS that Google and OpenDNS supports, that would give us much better accuracy of your actual location.

    I'm sorry with the teething problems you've encountered, and I assure you that we are working around the clock to improve the services. Nevertheless, I really appreciate the feedback that you've given, hopefully the next time you have any review, it's nothing short of spectacular experience with us

  19. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by wheimeng View Post
    Nevertheless, I really appreciate the feedback that you've given, hopefully the next time you have any review, it's nothing short of spectacular experience with us
    Thanks, it is a really exciting product and seems to be working overall!

    The support team is good, getting problems addressed in an hour in many cases. I look forward to working with it more.

  20. #20
    When I ran Gomez against OnApp and compared them to Akamai, EdgeCast, LimeLight, Level3, XDN and MaxCDN I found that OnApp was in the middle, close to EdgeCast. I also did some a/b testing to try and get a feel for performance but I don't had a site big enough to prove anything.

    If OnApp is not optimizing for Gomez, then the performance puts them up with the other major providers, ahead of MaxCDN but it's a unfair comparison since I did not have the APAC add-on from MaxCDN.

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