Recently, Dan Blecher, Product Manager at Google Cloud Platform, stated that Google is focused on building a cloud platform of how it thinks it will be in 5 to 10 years. In this post, we’ll do the same, but from a CDN perspective. And since CDN and infrastructure go hand-in-hand, we’ll make some predictions of how the technology landscape will look in that time. Ten years is a long time, lets not limit ourselves to any current technology bottlenecks. Here we go.
CDN Infrastructure of Year 2024
- 1 Rack will support 5M VMs, hundreds of PB’s of RAM, few Yotta bytes of storage and millions of cores
- Disk drives will cease to exist. Storage will be comprised of 1 fully packed motherboard that will replace dozen of racks of storage
- AWS, Azure and Google Cloud business models will cease to exist, giving way to a new business models
- Cloud Compute: Hardware will become so advanced that it will put an end to the variable cost model of cloud computing
- VMWare will cease to exist as a product, and free VM will dominate
- Cloud compute and CDN industry will collapse into one
- Security and CDN industry will collapse into one
- CDN DSA, ADN, and Middle-mile technologies will cease to exist
- CDN Edge POP cache hit ratio will be 100%
- CDN clients will push their entire business application stack to the CDN Edge, where it will be milliseconds away from end users, employees, customers and partners
- CDN Edge POPs will become highly intelligent full service CDNs. There will be no need to retrieve content from origin servers anymore, as it will become an origin unto itself
- CDN POPs will be connected via private dedicated fiber network, where POPs will sync with each other on application updates
- For CDNs, BGP will be sidelined, as CDNs push packets over their own dedicated network avoiding middle mile congestion
Snapshot of CDN of 2024
