In the past few months, we have published several blogs and case studies about CDN Pro that cover topics ranging from product features, price models, innovative CPU timing measurement, and dynamic traffic performance with CDNetworks’ proprietary HDT technologies to CDN Pro WAF solutions. And it has been another fresh new year, let’s review CDN Pro’s achievements in 2022, in the areas of security, Nginx-based serverless edge computing, performance, and network footprint.
Security First
Since the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, cyber threats and attacks have been increasing full throttle. Security and privacy protection continue to be major concerns over the internet. CDN Pro leverages its globally distributed network with integrated security infrastructures to protect customer websites and applications from various internet threats and L4 and L7 DDoS attacks.
When receiving requests from the internet, CDN Pro first analyzes the incoming traffic in real-time to identify attacks, and blocks the majority of the attacks at the L4 network layer using network bandwidth and computing power. Then the CDN Pro portal executes custom code or rules configured through its user interface or APIs to reject malicious requests at the L7 layer and provides feedback on the intelligence to the security system to benefit the entire edge product line.
In 2022, the CDNetworks CDN Pro platform alone defended over 100 times the number of DDoS attacks. Most notably, the platform mitigated the world’s largest DDoS attacks last April, which consumed a bandwidth of 1.2Tbps and inflicted a request rate as high as 35 million requests per second (Mrps).
Serverless Nginx Platform
During the past year, CDN Pro has improved its Nginx-based programming language, directives, and programming logic to effectively execute code and process customer request traffic.
CDN Pro, a serverless Nginx platform, enables customers to efficiently scale their applications worldwide and execute code at the edge without concerns about underlying infrastructures. The core of the CDN Pro serverless computing features is its Nginx-based Edge Logic – the program interface where users can control and program the process flow of the request traffic.
Powerful Programming Instruction Set
As mentioned in previous blogs, CDN Pro is based on the popular open-source Nginx project, but extends Nginx by enhancing existing directives to better suit the needs of a CDN proxy server. CDN Pro introduced a set of proprietary directives for boosting the CDN Pro functionalities. By the end of 2022, CDN Pro enhanced a total of 12 directives, added 25 proprietary directives, and supported 81 variables in its programming instruction set. These additions significantly boosted the robustness and efficiency of the CDN Pro programming language for customers to process CDN traffic and accelerate applications.
Load Balance Logic for Efficiency
To increase the efficiency and reduce the overhead of the edge servers, CDN Pro added CDN Pro Load Balance Logic in the traffic processing flow for the edge node, as shown in the following figure.
Before traffic hits the edge servers (ES), some of it can be processed first by the L7 load balancer for more efficient code execution. CDN Pro introduced a concept “loadBalancerLogic,” which allows a property’s configuration to permit the L7 Load Balancer (LB7) to handle this part of the requests. This approach results in reduced overhead, shorter execution time for data processing, and greater efficiency when building responses in the LB7.
CPU for Accurate Resource Usage Measurement
CDN Pro, at its heart, is a Nginx-based serverless cloud edge platform. Through natural evolution, CDN Pro adopted Cloud computing-related resource measurements. In April 2022, we introduced CPU timing as part of the CDN Pro resource consumption. This feature revolutionizes the traditional CDN cost model, removes the guesswork from traditional CDN cost calculations, and provides an equitable way to measure CDN resource consumption.
Cache Hit Ratio and Cost Savings
In 2022, the average cache hit ratio of CDN Pro was around 95%, meaning only around 5% of requests to our edge servers resulted in requests to the origin server to retrieve contents. With its globally distributed networks and the high content cache hit ratio, CDN Pro brought web content closer to visitors wherever they were, significantly improving access speed, performance, and user experience. In addition, directly serving the cached contents from CDN Pro edge reduced data transfers and lowered customer origin bandwidth costs.
World Class Performance
CDN Pro performance has always been world-class. Based on RUM tests conducted by CDNPerf, a third-party performance tool company, CDN Pro shows an unparalleled performance lead, especially in China and East Asia, with an impressive response time of as low as 14ms. The following chart shows a typical ranking for CDN Pro compared with other CDN vendors, where CDN Pro demonstrated global performance with 99.4% availability and a 45.16ms response time.
Network Expansion
During 2022, CDNetworks continuously expanded the CDN Pro network footprint worldwide. By December, the number of CDN Pro edge points of presence (PoPs) increased more than 12.5%, and now includes 37 new PoPs in 6 new countries: United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Brazil, Kuwait, Ecuador, and Sri Lanka. CDN Pro also upgraded many edge-based PoPs to address capacities in several regions currently being serviced, including various provinces in Mainland China. With the addition of new edge PoPs and upgrades, CDN Pro brings content closer than ever to end users, helps shorten the Time to First Byte, and further improves user engagement and user experiences for our customers.
Looking forward to 2023
With the world slowly exiting from the pandemic and marching into 2023, the internet will continue to play a critical role in enabling online workloads. Now, more than ever, the internet requires a secure, reliable, and high-performance CDN. CDN Pro will continue to fulfill its mission statement to protect our customers from cyber security attacks and vulnerabilities, expand its network reach to bring content closer to end users, and bring more product features to customers for even faster content and application delivery worldwide.
