as far as im aware ... a friend of mine on INEX in Ireland said most cdns use source ip of the DNS requests to determine which network to direct them to ... so if you use you have your own resolver on an ip address in your network range cdns can accurately determine what network the request is comming from and determine what ip address / what network that the cdn has nearest to your network... ff you use 3rd party dns servers for your clients... you may not get an optimal ip answer for your dns queries from the CDNS involved I hope this helps Tom Smyth On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 6:53 PM, Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net> wrote:
Some rely on performance testing to the client's DNS resolver and if they're not using on-net ones, they'll be directed to use a different CDN node.
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com
Midwest Internet Exchange http://www.midwest-ix.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Graham Johnston" <johnstong@westmancom.com> To: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org> Sent: Monday, June 6, 2016 8:36:43 AM Subject: Traffic engineering and peering for CDNs
Lately I have been putting in some effort to maximize our IX connections by trying to work with the top 5-ish list of ASNs that still send us traffic via a paid transit connection despite the fact that we are both present on the same IX(s). In one case I missed the fact that one ASN wasn't using the IXs route-servers, that's on me for not spotting that one.
Even with proper IX peering in place though it seems like some CDNs are better at using the IX connections than others. ASN 15169 for instance does an excellent job sending more than 99.99% of traffic via the IX connection; thank you. While others only seem to manage to send 60 - 80% of traffic via the IX. What I am not understanding about the respective CDN's network wherein they don't send traffic to me through a consistent path? Is the content coming from widely different places and rather than transport it across their own network from a remote site they would rather hot-potato it out a local transit connection? Are their transit costs so low that they don't care about using an IX connection over transit unlike a small operator like me? Is this just a non-obvious issue wherein they maybe just can't originate enough of the traffic near the IX and therefore don't make use of the IX connection, again a hot-potato phenomenon?
Secondly can someone explain to me why some CDNs want a gigabit or two of traffic to be exchanged between our respective networks before they would peer with me via a public IX? I totally get those kinds of thresholds before engaging in a private interconnect but I don't understand the reluctance with regard to a public IX, that they are already established at. Is it again just a simple case of bandwidth economics that operate at a different scale than I can comprehend?
I'm hoping the community can shed some light on this for me as I'm trying to avoid grilling the operators that are working with me as I don't expect those front line individuals to necessarily have a full view of the factors at play.
Thanks, Graham Johnston Network Planner Westman Communications Group 204.717.2829 johnstong@westmancom.com<mailto:johnstong@westmancom.com> P think green; don't print this email.
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