Flexible Topologies: Scaling your CDN to N tiers
Channel: The ASF
Date: 2020-10-15

Flexible Topologies: Scaling your CDN to N tiers
Zach Hoffman, Robert O Butts, Jeremy Mitchell

A presentation from ApacheCon @Home 2020
https://apachecon.com/acah2020/

Until recently, any CDN built using Apache Traffic Control would be limited to at most 2 tiers—an Edge Tier and a Mid Tier—which limits the CDN's ability to scale as needed. A recent project allows a CDN to be broken into Topologies, each of which can span any number of tiers. This talk explores the changes to the project this initiative has involved, the capabilities of Flexible Topologies, and the steps involved to adapt an existing CDN to use Flexible Topologies.

Zach Hoffman lives in Denver, Colorado and is a software engineer at Comcast. They spend their spare time contributing to online puzzle game communities and playing the piano. When working on Apache Traffic Control, they focus on its Go and Java components.

Robert O Butts is a software engineer who works on Apache Traffic Control for the Comcast CDN. Rob is a Principal Engineer at Comcast with a Masters in Computer Science focusing on Parallel Processing. Rob has worked on nearly every component of the Apache Traffic Control CDN. He is the primary author of Traffic Monitor, was the initial primary author of the Golang Traffic Ops, and wrote the Grove HTTP Caching Proxy. He is currently working on extending Apache Traffic Server for Traffic Control's needs.

Jeremy has been an Apache Traffic Control contributor for over 5 years with a primary focus on the Traffic Portal (UI) and Traffic Ops API components. During that time, he has witnessed exponential growth of the Comcast CDN enabled by the power, flexibility and reliability of ATC.