CDN

Content Delivery Network Management as a Service

Note: This is a work in progress and is not currently recommended for production use.

What is CDN

Users have come to expect exceptional speed in their applications, websites, and video experiences. Because of this, using a CDN has become standard for companies, no matter their size.

CDN will take all the guess work out of the CDN market for our users. CDN will give them a consistently speedy experience from integrated partners, with an easy to use RESTful API.

Vendor lock-in to a particular CDN provider is removed by abstracting away the plethora of vendor API's available. This means that a customer only has to integrate with one CDN API, and reap the benefits of using multiple providers.

Your content can be distributed to multiple providers seamlessly instead of just one.

Running performance benchmarks against each configured CDN provider allows you to simply repoint your DNS at the new provider; and with that simple change you can ensure your application is running using the fastest provider at the time. It will also allow you to handle CDN failures and minimize disruption to your application from CDN outages.

Features

• Wraps third party CDN provider API's

  • Fastly (http://www.fastly.net)
  • Your CDN here

• Sends configurations to n configured CDN providers

• Supports multiple backends (CassandraDB recommended)

  • CassandraDB
  • Your DB provider here

• Openstack Compatable

  • Uses Keystone for authentication

• Multiple Origins to pull from (including Rackspace Cloud Files)
• Supports Multiple Domains
• Custom Caching and TTL rules
• Set Restrictions on who can access cached content

What CDN is not

CDN does not run its own Edge Cache or POP servers. This is purely a management API to abstract away the myriad of CDN providers on the market.

Getting Started

Note: These instructions are for running a local instance of CDN and not all of these steps are required. It is assumed you have CassandraDB installed and running.

1. From your home folder create the ~/.cdn folder and clone the repo:

   $ cd
   $ mkdir .cdn
   $ git clone https://github.com/rackerlabs/cdn.git

2. Copy the CDN config files to the directory ~/.cdn:

   $ cp cdn/etc/cdn.conf ~/.cdn/cdn.conf
   $ cp cdn/etc/logging.conf ~/.cdn/logging.conf

3. Find the [drivers:storage:cassandradb] section in ~/.cdn/cdn.conf and modify the URI to point to your local casssandra cluster:

   [drivers:storage:cassandra]
   cluster = "localhost"
   keyspace = cdn

4. By using cassandra storage plugin, you will need to create the default keyspace "cdn" on your cassandra host/cluster. So log into cqlsh, do:

   cqlsh> CREATE KEYSPACE cdn WITH REPLICATION = { 'class' : 'SimpleStrategy' , 'replication_factor' :  1}  ;

5. For logging, find the [DEFAULT] section in ~/.cdn/cdn.conf and modify as desired:

   log_file = server.log

6. Change directories back to your local copy of the repo:

   $ cd cdn

7. Install general requirements:

   $ pip install -r requirements/requirements.txt

   Install Requirements for each Provider configured:

   $ pip install -r cdn/providers/fastly/requirements.txt

   Run the following so you can see the results of any changes you make to the code without having to reinstall the package each time:

   $ pip install -e .

   Installing the fastly client library may have issues. Copy the README.md file to README and try again.

8. Start the CDN server:

   $ cdn-server

9. Test out that CDN is working by requesting the home doc:

   $ curl -i -X GET http://0.0.0.0:8888/v1.0

You should get an HTTP 200 along with some headers that will look similar to this:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 14:34:21 GMT
Server: WSGIServer/0.1 Python/2.7.3
Content-Length: 464
Content-Type: application/json-home
Cache-Control: max-age=86400

Installing Cassandra Locally

Mac OSX

1. Update your Java SDK to the latest version (v7+)

   http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html

You can check the version currently running with

$java -version

2. Follow the instructions on the datastax site to install cassandra for Mac OSX

   http://www.datastax.com/2012/01/working-with-apache-cassandra-on-mac-os-x

3. CREATE KEYSPACE cdn WITH REPLICATION = { 'class' : 'SimpleStrategy', 'replication_factor' : 1 };

4. Import the Cassandra Schema to set up the required tables that CDN will need

   Open ./cqlsh and import the /cdn/storage/cassandra/schema.cql file