title: Intent-Based Cloud CDNs
title: Rethinking the Communication Mechanism Between Content Providers and Cloud CDN Operators via Intent-Based Northbound Interface
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Alalmaei, Shiyam
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2024

description: Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are an important solution for easing
 Internet
 
 network traffic congestion and improving response latency. There is a
 growing trend to deploy Cloud CDNs (CCDNs) to provide more flexibility
 compared to traditional CDNs. Today, regardless of the current
 technological advancements, most CCDNs still make their resource and cache
 management decisions while being unaware of what Content Providers (CPs)
 want to achieve. For instance, the APIs of prominent CCDNs (such as Amazon
 CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN, and Microsoft Azure CDN) do not allow CPs to
 express their high-level targets, e.g., requests/region. Instead, CPs are
 mainly limited to specifying the desired geographical coverage and the
 origin content server. Fortunately, there has been an increasing interest
 in the Intent-Based Networking (IBN) paradigm, which aims to allow users
 to express what they want to do (in the form of an intent) instead of how
 to do it. By employing IBN, CCDNs could move towards a communication
 scheme that is more adaptive, flexible, and portable,
 
 that tries to automate meeting the CP’s intent target throughout the pre-
 and postdeployment phases of a service.
 
 
 In this thesis, we present a solution to enable such Intent-Based CCDN. We
 
 illustrate how microservices modularity could be utilized in the intent
 translation
 
 process, decomposing intents into behavioral abstract policies that in
 turn get
 
 translated into technical realizations as microservices. This provides a
 more flexible, cost-effective, interoperable solution, and enables
 stakeholders to compare and alternate between microservice alternatives
 depending on the CP’s intent. We propose and implement a Low-Cost Intent
 (LCI) that targets cost reduction while provisioning a CCDN.We evaluate
 several realizations of this LCI, namely LCI1, LCI2 and LCI3 via selecting
 different microservice alternatives (i.e., leading to different overall
 CCDN deployments) for each. Additionally, we propose and implement
 different LCI refinement algorithms for performance improvement in various
 traffic scenarios. We conduct our evaluation experiments on Google
 Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and test it using traces of real CDN traffic
 obtained from a major ISP. Evaluating our refined LCI different
 realizations against a baseline of GKE demonstrated the differences
 between these varying options. The best was LCI1 which reduced
 infrastructure cost by up to 10% in return for a 2% rise in dropped
 requests. On the other hand, although LCI2 also led to cost reduction up
 to 10%, it caused an increased request drops by almost 20%. Finally LCI3
 led to the highest infrastructure cost reduction by up to 20% but in
 return for the highest rise in dropped requests by 40%. Interestingly, in
 a traffic bursts scenario, although the refined LCI resulted no cost
 reduction, it actually outperformed the baseline by reducing the amount of
 dropped requests by 30%. Accordingly, we discuss the factors that led to
 these different variations between the different LCI flavors based on
 their corresponding selected microservice alternatives.