The free video-hosting platform Vimeo, has adopted Multi-Regional Google Cloud Storage, one of the new storage classes that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) recently unveiled during its major refresh of Google Cloud Storage platform. Crucially, GCP has been integrated with Fastly’s CDN, allowing Vimeo to achieve sub-150 millisecond response times.
Vimeo has 35 million registered members and a 160 million strong global monthly audience, making it the world’s largest open transactional VOD platform. It uses Fastly CDN to upload, update and purge content in real-time, including the billion+ thumbnail images on its site. On the other hand, Vimeo uses GCP for application hosting and metrics.
Fastly on GCP
Fastly integrates with GCP using Cloud Accelerator, meaning Vimeo has a CDN that works seamlessly with GCP, allowing it to bypass the public internet and connect directly with GCP’s network edge, dramatically reducing response times.
Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator interconnects GCP with Fastly’s network in two crucial locations, as well as with nine Fastly PoPs around the world. These interconnections allow GCP customers to use Fastly to accelerate and cache content, and use VCL to flexibly execute application logic at the edge with low latency. Fastly’s Origin Shield is deployed between GCP and the edge cache to reduce origin load, collapse requests to the origin on cache-misses, and load balance, thereby improving cache hit rates.
As such, Vimeo when adopted Fastly on Google Cloud Storage, it achieved breakneck sub-150 millisecond response times.
Multi-Regional Google Cloud Storage
Multi-Regional Google Cloud Storage enables high availability levels and geo-redundancy, which is optimal for seamless service to users distributed over disparate geographical regions.
Multi-Regional Cloud Storage has geo-redundancy protocols in place, in case of regional outage, which direct Cloud Storage to route requests to another available region to avoid disruption. The solution is also competitively priced at $0.026 per GB per month, a rate that covers storage of all replicas, replication over the Google network, and connection rerouting.
“We use Google Cloud Platform, including Google Cloud Storage and Compute Engine along with Fastly, for storing and delivering all popular and infrequently accessed content and to handle our peak transcode loads,” says Naren Venkataraman, Senior Director of Engineering at Vimeo.