Agreed - the usage has risen hugely but that doesn't mean that it won't continue to fracture. The barriers to entry in running a CDN are not enormous and lots of startups are able to enter.
> This increases centrality, as the point of failure is the parent CDN.
Creating POPs is not as trivial as creating a Heroku or Render like service on top of public clouds. While there are EC2s and public cloud VMs in various geographically distributed locations around the world, the instances in the actual POP regions are usually inaccessible.
Example:
- AWS has 25 regions [0]
- AWS CloudFront has 225 POP regions [1]
Partnering with Equinix/etc. and other ISPs to establish more POPs is an expensive and time-consuming process. Unless the CDN has a good edge-close-to-cities presence and a high number of those, users will generally not see value in the CDN.
> Creating POPs is not as trivial as creating a Heroku or Render like service on top of public clouds.
I didn't claim that it was.
> Unless the CDN has a good edge-close-to-cities presence and a high number of those, users will generally not see value in the CDN.
A home truth is that most CDN users don't give a monkeys about per-city POPs. If you just had one POP per continent that would probably be sufficient to cut latency by ~75% for cache hits. Many real world CDNs have <50 POPs (eg CDN77, which has 33) and some have <25 (eg BunnyCDN sells a package with just 8 POPs). These businesses have already existed for some years and have a real customer bases.
Sorry it was ambiguous. By “users”, we mean the business buyers of the CDN service. Eg: As a developer, I don’t know where exactly my users are, if thus I was spending the same, then I would rationally prefer a CDN which has more POPs than one which has fewer.
> This increases centrality, as the point of failure is the parent CDN.
Only for a while, as they are starting up
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