Information Sharing, CDN Federation and the IETF CDNi Working Group.

When I look at the Internet as a whole, I recognize that while there are standards, those standards are meant to help people create hardware/software that will interoperate with others. Standards that are meant to avoid distribution of necessary information due to it being classified proprietary are not as valuable as those that work to define a process.

Currently the CDNI group is working partly to satisfy the providers who are concerned that giving out too much information will allow other providers to use that information in an underhanded way. I do not agree with this direction.

In order for a federation to work, all of the providers in the federation must have something to offer. This means these providers are valuable to the ecosystem. If a provider is advertising x while only having y (capacity/features/etc) then the provider is not a trustworthy addition to the federation.

That being said, my experience from negotiating peering, dealing with DoS and DDoS attacks and other networking issues since the early 90′s has taught me that there will always be a back channel for communication between entities that rely on each other. This will have to be true in CDN Federation.

I am going to recount my view of being in the middle of one of the more famed DDoS attacks. TL;DR – MafiaBoy took down one of my customers and working with my peers at other ISPs was why the damage was limited.

In February of 2000 there was (the first) high-profile DDoS attack on multiple Internet properties including Amazon, eBay, Buy.Com, Onsale and others. During this time I was working for Exodus Communications as a Sr. Network Engineer.

The whole time the engineering and security teams from the different ISPs hosting the providers under attack (myself included) were freely sharing any information possible to help and be helped dealing with the situation. This information included things like router versions, hardware, packet captures, filters used/tried, etc.

I believe this is one of the main reasons the attacks were only effective for short periods of time. This was not the first or last time that these types of discussions happened.

The future of CDN Part 1

A little while ago I left my cushy job at Cisco Systems and went back to the gritty world of startups.  For those of you who don’t know I’ve done 3 startups in my life:  Exodus Communications (Acquired by Cable & Wireless), Procket Networks (Acquired by Cisco) and now 3Crowd Technologies, INC.

3Crowd brings a new level of control to Content Delivery Networks; offering the CrowdDirector product with the ability to balance your traffic between contemporary CDNs, Federated CDNs and/or your own CDN (Created using our CrowdCache software).  By offering these tools we are helping content providers to better control their cost/performance ratios, moving traffic around as needed based on performance needs (or a lack of performance).

One of the core differentiators with the 3Crowd CrowdDirector solution vs other solutions is the ability to use the system to do exactly what you are doing today and then add extras as wanted/needed.  In a sense, you can use 3Crowd as a resilient DNS/HTTP redirector system with your current CDN (or even non CDN) assets.  If you find another CDN or put up some of your own Caches you can then use the 3Crowd CrowdDirector to move some or all of your traffic there.

More Later.. :)

The issue with CPA Ad Networks

I’ve been experimenting this week with CPA Ad Networks and trying to figure out how they can help me monetize my sites in a post-amazon California. I have so far signed up with 2 providers who I shall not name at this time. Both approved me quickly and have been very supporting and helpful.

With the first one, I was browsing for CPA Ads that were simple, straightforward and would fit my consumers. I found one where it was a simple Survey, choose national brand a or b. There didn’t seem to be any issues with the ad so I grabbed the html and put it on one of my sites as a test. I went to the site, clicked on the ad and… wham all the alarms went off in my browser complaining about “possible malware distribution site” and basically blocking me from going to the landing page.

I talked with my “ad manager” from the ad network and informed them of the issue I found. The response I got was underwhelming. The main response was to look for other ads and see if they also had issues and choose the ones that did not. This tells me the companies are more concerned about their bottom line then the quality of what they provide.

I then went and signed up with a second company, which is rated highly in the CPA/CPC space. At first everything looked good, I found an ad that I liked and felt would match my customer base, put it on my site to test it. No problems with the ad. I went looking for another ad that would match a different site, and when I clicked to preview it.. wham again, all the alarms went off and I was informed that this was yet another known malware distribution site.

I am currently 2 for 2 on choosing bad companies. Is the CPA/CPC Ad space just this bad? I have an ethical issue with serving any ads to my viewers that might harm them. I can’t trust either of these vendors and I don’t know if there are any others that are any better.

If you want to know who the networks are, just drop me a line.

SONN is looking for Authors and Editors

Wow, what a month it has been. The new Crush site has gone crazy, going from hundreds of visitors a week to thousands of visitors a day! We have been adding new, relevant, unique content every day but we are not able to keep up. If you are a writer/editor who is interested in helping out on a site that is going up fast, drop us a note using the contact form.

The Relaunch of Crush.org

In the last few weeks we have been working hard on relaunching Crush as a better site with more relevant and useful content. Feel free to pop on by and let us know how you like it!

Blogroll

Designed by SONN
©2012 SONN