Re:DIY Video Hosting
by bigiain on Monday July 20, 2020 @03:36AM
(#23895573)
> To expand on this, the answer isn't buy a CDN solution. The answer is make CDN solutions so easy to implement that anyone can ...
... update their CNAMEs to point at a different company's CDN or a different video serving platform, and wait for the DNS to propagate
To me at least, the risk of a CDN or a video hosting service going bad or pulling your content is mostly the same risk as "colos around the world" going bad or pulling your content. Possibly a lower risk for most people - the chance of Cloudfront/Cloudflare/Akamai or AWS/Azure/GCE going broke or shutting you down is quite a lot lower than the risk of other smaller colo providers and your own hardware going dark. There's probably a smaller gap between smaller CDNs and cloud compute providers compared to rolling your own - but for most use cases I'd guess having a "cloud agnostic' design and ability to switch compute and CDN resources quickly and easily is a lower effort and more reliable way to reduce existential risk to your business.
I'm sure there are businesses who's risk estimates don't match mine - Darknet Markets for sure, probably "adult content" as well (given the observed puritanical zeal some of that industry gets deplatformed with). But for most clients and projects I've worked on in the 15-ish years since "Cloud services" became mainstream, owning hardware and leasing colo space would have been a totally misplaced cost/risk optimisation.(And I say that as someone wo used to do 2 or 3 trips a year from Sydney to colo facilities in the US and the UK with my luggage filled up with pre-loaded harddrives and toolkits to screw them into servers we owned on both US coasts and in London. I kinda miss the travel a bit, but I _totally_ prefer being able to get my phone out and provision new cloud "hardware" instead of hoping i had enough hot spare capacity somewhere, and ordering new hardware and plane tickets to fix disasters...)
... update their CNAMEs to point at a different company's CDN or a different video serving platform, and wait for the DNS to propagate
To me at least, the risk of a CDN or a video hosting service going bad or pulling your content is mostly the same risk as "colos around the world" going bad or pulling your content. Possibly a lower risk for most people - the chance of Cloudfront/Cloudflare/Akamai or AWS/Azure/GCE going broke or shutting you down is quite a lot lower than the risk of other smaller colo providers and your own hardware going dark. There's probably a smaller gap between smaller CDNs and cloud compute providers compared to rolling your own - but for most use cases I'd guess having a "cloud agnostic' design and ability to switch compute and CDN resources quickly and easily is a lower effort and more reliable way to reduce existential risk to your business.
I'm sure there are businesses who's risk estimates don't match mine - Darknet Markets for sure, probably "adult content" as well (given the observed puritanical zeal some of that industry gets deplatformed with). But for most clients and projects I've worked on in the 15-ish years since "Cloud services" became mainstream, owning hardware and leasing colo space would have been a totally misplaced cost/risk optimisation.(And I say that as someone wo used to do 2 or 3 trips a year from Sydney to colo facilities in the US and the UK with my luggage filled up with pre-loaded harddrives and toolkits to screw them into servers we owned on both US coasts and in London. I kinda miss the travel a bit, but I _totally_ prefer being able to get my phone out and provision new cloud "hardware" instead of hoping i had enough hot spare capacity somewhere, and ordering new hardware and plane tickets to fix disasters...)