CDN77, the London based pure-play global CDN continues to grow at a rapid clip. Founded in 2011, CDN77 has increased their number of active customers to 3,500 and employee count to 35. Their customers come from all parts of the globe including Europe, APAC, North America and LatAm. At the present time, CDN77 has 27 PoPs, including some that are located in the more exotic places like Seoul, New Delhi, Chile, Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo. Based on our findings, CDN77 has closed the feature set gap with Highwinds, CloudFront and CacheFly. Thus, CDN77 is a feature-set away from becoming an elite CDN that’s on par with some of leaders in the US ecosystem. A big thanks to the CDN77 team for participating in this Q&A session.
Are more European CDNs entering the market?
We are definitely seeing the market growing fast. New companies are entering the market place, but they usually start off as resellers of existing CDNs. The main reason they go this route is to avoid the upfront cost of building a CDN from scratch. Building a CDN requires a lot of hardware, connectivity, and engineering resources that is challenging for even the large companies.
Describe the most complex CDN customer implementation over the last six months?
Recently, we worked with the European Southern Observatory. The cool thing is the Observatory is delivering images and videos from the space telescopes, including the Hubble. Some of their files are very large, sometimes exceeding 400 GB in size. That in itself presents many technical challenges. In order to accommodate this requirement, we had to update the file system at our edge locations. Once that was completed, the problem was solved, and we have a very happy customer today. This flexibility demonstrates our ability to offer services beyond the cookie cutter CDN solutions. Our goal is to meet the needs of our customer requirements, regardless of how unique or challenging they might be.
Describe your CDN Infrastructure?
CDN77 currently has 27 active Points of Presence across 5 continents. In each PoP, we have deployed top-notch bare metal hardware running fast and reliable SSD drives, vast amounts of RAM, and the latest in processing power. In addition, each PoP is connected with multiple 10Gbps uplinks from the leading global Tier 1 ISP’s.
Do you plan on developing the next generation feature set in the areas of WAF, Cyber Security, FEO, DSA and CDN RAN?
We are currently developing some of those features mentioned above. We’ll be introducing one of them in our next platform update, which is coming out in the next few months. The first step in the product development process is to work closely with our customers, in order to obtain their feedback. Thereafter, we perform extensive research, then we beta-test the feature to make sure its working according to plan. Since we are more nimbler, we work faster than our larger competitors.