My Own Private CDN

https://www.petekeen.net/my-own-private-cdn

by zrail • 8 years ago

123 39 8 years ago

petekeen.net

xxdesmus• 8 years ago

"NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID"

off to a good start...

Your cert is valid only for corastreetpress{.}com

zrail7• 8 years ago

Hmmmmm! Thanks for the bug report!

Edit: fixed. T'was a dumb copy and paste error.

1996• 8 years ago

The main problem is often geoip, and properly using the results of said GeoIP.

Having a dozen of POPs around the world is a trivial weekeend project.

Routing the client to the faster one and scaling up to local demands while optimizing given bandwith price is not trivial. Because not everything is Digital Ocean, for example what about Japan? Or Brazil?

zrail7• 8 years ago

Absolutely. This project leans heavily on AWS route53’s latency-based routing. I don’t do the magic, route53 does.

michaelgv5• 8 years ago

As someone who just recently CDN hell, and rebuilt our entire CDN network from the ground up (software and hardware), I was wondering why you picked RoR?

zrail7• 8 years ago

It’s what I know best and what I’m most productive in. The project is to get something running and learn a handful of new things, and learning a new framework would be a detriment to that first goal.

The manager app is not in the hot path with this design so performance doesn’t matter all that much.

michaelgv5• 8 years ago

Are you designing this CDN to pull from origin, cache temporarily? Or to pull from local file and put strong cache on it?

If you need a hand let me know, I’ve built pretty large CDNs before (10M r/s at peak)

tmh88j• 8 years ago

What would you suggest and why? Not a loaded question for all the people eager to downvote.

skunkworker3• 8 years ago

Personally I would build it in something like Go. I've done a lot of work in Rails and I would probably have the signup/profile/interface built in Rails 5.2 but use a high performant go framework for the really intensive stuff.

I've been considering building my own but getting an up and running gossip protocol to have it share data between nodes isn't the easiest thing in the world to code.

oneplane• 8 years ago

I think the N part of the CDN is going to be the real thing here, the CD part is easy, especially with the various FOSS options out there.

fooblat• 8 years ago

This. Building a "CDN" on top of an existing network is not building a CDN. Nice project to learn some parts of CDN management software tho.

anotherrobot• 8 years ago

Dont see the point if its not distributed across networks.

hegz• 8 years ago

Digital ocean has a bunch of locations

jsjohnst2• 8 years ago

Location is far from the only factor, peering can make as much of a difference too. Not saying DO is bad, but there are more factors at play than just location diversity.

zshenker• 8 years ago

You could also look at something like Apache Traffic Control, which came out of Comcast, and is used by a number of CDNs. https://trafficcontrol.apache.org/

jsjohnst2• 8 years ago

which came out of Comcast

Not that it matters, but some fun history for you. ATC is built on top of Apache Traffic Server. Before being donated over to ASF, ATS was known as YTS (Yahoo! Traffic Server). Of course the story doesn’t stop there, it was originally known as Inktomi Traffic Server, Inktomi having been acquired by Yahoo! in the early 2000s.

greyman• 8 years ago

Good exercise, but I doubt this will be cheaper than a commercial offering like Cloudflare, for example.

jgrahamc• 8 years ago

Sure, but some things are done just for fun, others to prove it can be done. It's not all about the $

Also, TFA is talking this vs. CloudFront which is $$$

powmonk• 8 years ago

The skills you pick up from even attempting these things are probably the biggest reason for doing it. And bragging rights maybe?

djhworld• 8 years ago

Deploy onto the server in my basement on my ZeroTier network

I've read as much as I can handle of the website of this ZeroTier thing and I still can't fully grok it.

What's the difference between this and your own private VPN?

y4mi• 8 years ago

Zero Tier is peer to peer.

zimbatm• 8 years ago

A VPN is point-to-point. You fire up the client on your laptop and connect to a server. That server is usually also acting as a bridge into a network. It gives your machine a presence into that other well defined network.

ZeroTier is an overlay network. What is does it create a new encrypted network, with it's own address space and everything, on which you can connect through the controller (a default one is provided by ZeroTier). It doesn't matter where the nodes are. If it detects that two nodes are on the same LAN it's going to route the traffic directly. The overlay network is encrypted all the time, even when it goes over your LAN.

jlgaddis• 8 years ago

Sounds kinda like DMVPN.

giancarlostoro• 8 years ago

I wonder how long till shared hosting or some sort of similar cloud hosting takes off more that handles a lot of this nuance for you. CDN's can really reduce a lot of the heavy burdens that a single server will face which is downloading static files. Not familiar enough with all the things offered on the cloud, just with the few tools I've used so anyone who might already be aware can let me know. I know the author mentions Amazon's Route53 but I'm on about an all-inclusive solution like one would find in shared hosting that could include:

* SSL - Free tier would bring Let's Encrypt SSL Certs by default, the end-user shouldn't even think about how it works or anything of the sort, it should just work. * CDN - no need to even think about how it works, ServerlessCDN type of stuff. * Host any kind of app (maybe some sort of serverless approach or docker, though the less you have to mess with even more dev tools the better) * Intuitive admin panel for when SHTF with detailed logging.

I'm surprised we're still stuck in the era of CPANEL and L*MP stacks. Imagine if anyone could install and run Discourse as easily as they do Wordpress, same with Ghost. DigitalOcean comes pretty close in this regard, but maybe something more fool proof for the average joe would be great.

ohhellno• 8 years ago

What you describe sounds like now.sh if you are on a JS-based stack.

Edit: also for just plain static if you use a non-JS generator.

Ayesh• 8 years ago

One of the most painful things to work on would be clearing caches. I have my own setup that I invalidate the _entire_ set of assets just to make sure the end users do not get stale assets, and I just ++ a build ID and all the URLs are uncached at the edges. Not all sites hosted in shared hosts can do this.

zrail7• 8 years ago

My plan for this is to just tell the cache nodes to delete the nginx cache folder entirely via their one-minute check in cycle. Each node will get a flag in the database that says "needs clearing" and when they check in next their update script will include an `rm -rf /nginx/cache/directory/*`. Extremely blunt but also easy and effective.

extra88• 8 years ago

Dreamhost shared hosting includes Let's Encrypt and Cloudflare, click a checkbox to enable them.

https://www.dreamhost.com/hosting/ssl-tls-certificates/

https://www.dreamhost.com/partners/cloudflare/

ksec2• 8 years ago

I look through the goals, apart from self learning experience, bunnycdn.com seems to fit all the bills without the hassle. And despite its pricing, it is pretty damn fast as well.

zrail7• 8 years ago

I can get 4TB of transfer from Vultr or Digital Ocean for half that price.

In any case, the cost considerations are somewhat secondary. I wanted to learn some stuff and this is a practical way to do it :)

ksec2• 8 years ago

I wanted to learn some stuff and this is a practical way to do it :)

Fair enough.

I can get 4TB of transfer from Vultr or Digital Ocean for half that price.

You still need multiple POPS, with each droplet in those region the minimum cost is still going to be higher.

My Own Private CDN

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