What I want from a CDN

I was looking around last night at different CDN solutions out there. Everything from Amazon’s new CloudFront to CacheFly to Limelight and a couple others.

All of them have different features and levels of performance but the one thing I really want to be able to do is on-demand invalidation. Regular TTLs are fine for static items like images, css, js, videos and the like. But what about regular HTML files? Most of today’s websites these days have pages that are dynamic in some way or another. What I would like to be able to do is generate a page, cache it in a CDN and then if/when needed tell the CDN to remove that file immediately. Not hours from now. From what I can tell, none of the solutions I looked at had that ability. CloudFront has a minimum TTL of 24 hours. Limelight is just over an hour. I couldn’t find the info on CacheFly.

Where I find this most appropriate is an ecommerce app. Say you have a product page that you want to cache. Makes sense, but what if you want to be proactive to the customer and let them know when that item is not longer in stock instead of waiting until they add it to the cart? That isn’t a very good customer experience.

I specifically mention ecommerce because one, I’ve worked for a big one and two it has been shown that reductions of mere milliseconds in latency increases revenue.

Surely there is a solution out there that can do this?

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Comments

scary. I was just having this conversation yesterday. With our various CDN partners we supposedly have API calls in to be able to invalidate objects. Although it has been seen that one of the original ones we use can sometimes take as much as 30 minutes to push the invalidation command out to all their edge servers. The real killer thing would be Edge Side Includes, but we’ve ended up also using the ugly DOM abusing hidden iframe Client Side Include mechanism for alot of things. Origin servers still get hit for traffic, but it’s smaller payloads to deliver.

I’ve thought about doing something similar, use ajax or iframe for bringing in other content. Comments on a blog/news site is a use case there, but that is just so inefficient.

At my last company we used Akamai, but I never got a chance to play with their API so I don’t know if it had this feature or not. It seems the big guys are looking more at streaming media solutions instead of content solutions. Sites like Digg and facebook come to mind as perfect use cases for such a feature. It can’t be all that hard after all.

Imagine if say amazon had an extension of the SQS product that could push content out to the CDN product. now that would nice.

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