Adobe FMS has been a good friend to the CDN Community for many years. Back in the day, being able to offer RTMP streaming was a good thing, and CDNs charged a per GB premium for it. Hard to believe, but FMS really had no competition in those days. Adobe controlled pricing and could charge CDNs whatever they wanted to. Adobe made a bundle of money off of RTMP streaming, as well as CDNs, but times have changed, and all good things must come to an end, and that includes FMS. Recently, the Hacking Group incident shed light on how severely flawed the Flash plugin is, and not surprisingly many vulnerabilities came to light, including the dreaded zero day. Nothing new here, as Flash has been a nightmare for the security community for as long as one can remember.
Even if Adobe spent a billion dollars securing Flash, it still wouldn’t be secure, due to the fact that its a plugin, and plugins are susceptible to hacks. Google and Mozilla blocked Flash in their browsers, and Facebook is calling for its death; its game over for Flash. And since Flash and FMS are part of the same ecosystem, the Flash streaming technology must cease to exist. Its kind a bummer for CDNs, because now they must re-provision their servers to non-Flash technology. The good news, there are more cost effective alternatives to Flash. Therefore, CDNs better start thinking about End of Lifing their FMS infrastructure, because its a big liability. It competitive situations, the support of Flash can be used against a CDN. Also, there might be some legal liability in the equation, which is totally off of subject for this post.