A few days ago, I had the privilege of speaking to Manav Mitel, CEO and Founder of Instart Logic. During the first half of the call, he presented the roadmap and vision for Instart Logic. Thereafter, we had a productive Q&A session. The presentation was the best one I’ve seen to date. Instart Logic is redefining the CDN industry, and web application delivery. Their new approach, and architecture is called Software Defined Application Delivery (SDAD). Instart Logic is now in the SDAD business. Simply, SDAD is a new generation CDN, so much so that it’s no longer a traditional CDN. From this day forward, we’ll refer to Instart Logic as an SDAD, and not CDN.
The traditional CDN offers caching, dynamic content acceleration and front-end optimization. These three terms are easily understood by the folks in the CDN industry. However, Software Defined Application Delivery is a new concept and architecture that replaces DSA and FEO. For the CDN technologist, we have a tendency to think inside of the CDN box. When completely new technologies are introduced into the CDN industry, some of us have a difficult time grasping the technology. The SDAD business model is far different than anything we have seen in the past, because it incorporates elements of CDN, SDN, big data, wireless last mile, browser VM, and a few other technologies. The term Software Defined Application Delivery is the ideal word to describe Instart Logic.
DSA and FEO vs SDAD
Dynamic Site Acceleration and Front-end Optimization are acceleration methods and techniques that optimize content delivery from the first mile to the edge. While DSA optimizes the middle mile through TCP/IP optimizations, FEO optimizes the makeup of content within the browser, pushing the most important objects to the browser first for rapid rendering, and consolidating resources such as images into fewer objects, minimizing the number of requests going back and forth over the network. SDAD does much more than that, by adding a highly intelligent software layer to the entire delivery system from 1st mile to last mile.
SDAD is a Game Changer
Part of the software layer is in the form of a thin virtual machine that sits on top of the browser. The VM layer communicates back to the Instart Logic Cloud, which is the command and control center located in POPs close to the end user. The Instart Logic intelligent software layer is a game changing technology that mimics another disruptive technology we are all familiar, SDN (Software Defined Networking). SDAD incorporate SDN and behavioral technology that is able to discern the difference in the makeup of an object, taking into account the size of the object, color, type, and so on, predicting accurately the elements needed for quick time to render. And this is just the beginning for Instart Logic, as they have just introduce two new killer features, which we will discuss in another post.