Amazon CloudFront 前陣子宣佈了 two-tier 架構:「Announcing Regional Edge Caches for Amazon CloudFront」。
一般的 CDN 是 edge 收到後就打到 origin,這會使得 origin 的量比較大。而 two-tier 架構則是在中間疊一層降低對 origin 的量。這種架構對於直播時的 pattern 幫助很大:由於量很大,會需要用大量的 edge server 支撐,而 edge server 一多就對 origin 產生巨大的壓力。
一般直播 95% 的 hitrate 表示外面 20Gbps 的流量就會造成 origin 1Gbps 的流量,通常用 two-tier 可以拉到 98%+ (CDN vendor 有調整過可以到 99%+)。
這種技術在 Akamai 叫 Tiered Distribution,在 EdgeCast 叫 SuperPoP,而現在 CloudFront 也推出了,叫做 Regional Edge Cache:
The nine new Regional Edge Cache locations are in Northern Virginia, Oregon, São Paulo, Frankfurt, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Mumbai, and Sydney.
edge 會先到這幾個 regional edge 再到 origin:
These locations sit between your origin webserver and the 68 global edge locations that serve traffic directly to your viewers.
然後預設都開啟了,沒有額外費用:
Regional Edge Caches are turned on by default for your CloudFront distributions; you do not need to make any changes to your distributions to take advantage of this feature. There are also no additional charges to use this feature.
不過這個架構對於 latency 應該不會太好,沒得關閉有點奇怪...