Subject: Re: Taxonomy about CDNs

From: "Gary Tomlinson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2000 13:51:11 -0700

I agree with Ian's assessment that CDN's are little out of scope for the Taxonomy.  My reasoning here is, the ones's I'm familair with use a combination of open protocols and some proprietary protocols and algorithms to make them work.  The CDN's I've worked with gaurd thier "secret sauce" proprietary value adds as they see these are core differentiators today.  So, I would find it hard to document them in taxonomy given the proprietary constraints.

The whole concept of the taxonomy is a little difficult to capture accurately at any point in time.  We've done a good job of capturing the caching and replication space as it existed in the first half of 1999.  In order to get the document published, we need to have a sunset on it.  This of course leads to the need for WREC to define its future with respect to taxonomies.  We may want to consider producing a new version over the next year that emcompasses the last 12-18 months in this space, including CDN's (with help from some of the CDN's).

Gary

>>> Ian Cooper <[email-masked]> 02/09/00 10:12AM >>>
On Tue, 8 Feb 2000 14:23:02 +0100 , LOVRIC Ivan CNET/DMI/CAE wrote:

>For the next IETF, I suggest to add CDN considerations to the taxonomy
>draft.
>
>Vendors like Akamai, Adero, Sandpiper use caches and/or mirrors to deliver
>content.
>At present, it is still difficult to see if CDN vendors use proprietary or
>standard protocols. Also, it is not easy to define exactly what are the
>boundaries of content delivery.
>That is why, IMO, CDNs are in the scope of the WREC WG, and therefore
>appropriate taxonomy should be defined.

Do you mean the taxonomy?  (Or am I just totally brain dead today?)

Section 5 of the taxonomy describes inter-replica communication (I
need to go back and see what wording it uses to check that we're
covered for things like "Master Origin Server"), and 3.1.1 describes
client-replica communication.

While I agree that the discussion of CDNs, and the protocols that are
used to distribute content among replicas, is useful, I'm not sure
that this belongs in the taxonomy itself.