CGN vs. CDN

March 16, 2009 on 1:24 pm | In New Features, Tech News by Josh Jones | 49 Comments

After my freshman year in college I went back home for the summer and had a strange job at a little two-man pre-press graphics shop in Vienna, Virginia called “Color Graphics Network” (not the inspiration for New Dream Network – parent company of DreamHost).

The guy who owned it was named Ricky Dee (awesome name), and I vaguely knew his son Howie Dee (awesome name) from high school. It was a pretty cushy job compared to my previous one.

What CGN did was take large (dozens of MB!) graphic files from publishers, and turn them into high-resolution negatives suitable for printing presses. This was in 1995, and the files would come on SyQuest drives via courier. By the end of the summer, some people were starting to send zip disks!

After a few weeks, I was sort of thinking everybody could probably distribute this content a little better, maybe via a series of tubes or something. But really, with the slowness of dial-up, the size of these files, and the publication deadlines they needed to meet, this was the only way to go at the time.

Not that I’ve kept in touch, but I imagine that these days there’s a lot less padded envelope use over at CGN. I’m sure Mr. Sneakernet has finally been usurped by Mr. Internet!

Yep, Mr. Internet has gotten a bit faster in the last 14 years. Way fast. More than fast enough for whatever kind of multi-GB files Ricky Dee (or maybe it’s Howie now!) must be dealing with today.

And yet, still not fast enough for everybody.

Hence the rise of the CDN (“Content Delivery Network”). Although you can pretty much get between any two points on the Internet in under .3 seconds, sometimes that’s a little too slow. After 14 years of the web, people are really sick of waiting. Even a second. Even a third of a second.

In fact, there are a bunch of studies that show things like “There’s a 10% drop in conversions for each 1 second increase in load time.” and “Google lost 20% of their ad clicks when their page results took .9 seconds to load as opposed to .4.”

Fortunately, a decade ago Akamai discovered (I think it was them!) that putting multiple copies of the same content all over the Internet could cut that .3 second access time down to .03 seconds… and that some people would pay for it!

Today there are dozens of companies offering CDNs, not the least of whom is Amazon, who four months ago launched “CloudFront” as part of their Amazon Web Services.

The cool thing about CloudFront (besides, like DreamHost, it being in CamelCaps), is like all of the Amazon Web Services, it’s completely pay-as-you-go, and completely accessible via an API.

The downside of CloudFront is, just like with all APIs… you have to be a programmer to be able to use it!

Until now!!?!

We just added a new Amazon CloudFront area to our panel (under “Goodies”)!

Now all you have to do to take advantage of a world-wide pay-as-you-go content delivery network run by Amazon is click a few buttons!

Or, more specifically:

1. Sign up with AWS.
2. Go to our panel and let us know what domain (maybe something like “static.domain.com”) you’d like to use and what path we should upload the content to Amazon from!

And for this amazing convenience, what do we want from you?

I would say nothing, but the truth is just $3.95/month on top of whatever Amazon bills you! No matter how many CDNs you set up!

How does it work?

I was always a little confused, technically, about how CDNs worked. After all, there must be at least one centralized service that figures out where to send people, right?!

Well, while testing out CloudFront, I figured it out… that one centralized service is DNS!

The DNS servers for a CDN are dynamic and tricky… and it’s they who figure out which “edge” of the CDN is closest to you, based on your IP.

So for example, if I (in Los Angeles) do a ping on images.groo.com, my results are:

ping images.groo.com

PING d2onuwnge3cit8.lax1.cloudfront.net (216.137.45.27) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from server-216-137-45-27.lax1.cloudfront.net (216.137.45.27): icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=1.29 ms
64 bytes from server-216-137-45-27.lax1.cloudfront.net (216.137.45.27): icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=1.21 ms
64 bytes from server-216-137-45-27.lax1.cloudfront.net (216.137.45.27): icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=1.31 ms
64 bytes from server-216-137-45-27.lax1.cloudfront.net (216.137.45.27): icmp_seq=4 ttl=56 time=1.18 ms
64 bytes from server-216-137-45-27.lax1.cloudfront.net (216.137.45.27): icmp_seq=5 ttl=56 time=1.32 ms

Now you give it a shot and check out what cloudfront.net server you get for “images.groo.com” .. and how the ping time it is! Maybe even post your results in the comments?

I’m not sure how old Ricky Dee is going to compete.

The Benefit of Being Me

March 14, 2009 on 11:46 am | In Funnyish, Insider View by Josh Jones | 10 Comments

They say you learn something every day, and although I’m pretty sure I didn’t learn anything on June 24th, 2003, I totally made up for it on March 13th, 2009 by learning TWO.

Maybe “they” just mean you learn something every day, on average.

The number one thing I learned yesterday was that if you don’t show up for the first leg of a round-trip ticket, airlines (at least AA, but I’m sure they all do) cancel your ENTIRE itinerary, with no money back!

Yeppo. I got my round-trip ticket on American (in-flight wifi!) two weeks ago to fly to New York for our second and final open house, and shortly after I booked it I realized my 9:30pm red-eye Wednesday night wouldn’t mesh too well with our 9pm Dream Machine season opener (a 40-62 loss).

It turned out it’d cost as much to change my ticket as booking a new one-way flight on Delta ($129) leaving at 11pm, so I just did that and didn’t bother to notify American at all.

Well, upon my attempt to check in online for my return flight, I found out that wasn’t necessarily the 100% correct course of action. Fortunately the friendly Indian call center guy was very clear; it would now cost me $449 to get on the return portion of my flight that I’d already paid $309 (round-trip) for!

Lucky you, you’ve already hit your learning quota for today!

So. I checked around and found out I could get a flight (through Atlanta) on AirTran for $159, and I booked that.

(Oh, a bonus thing I learned yesterday! On AirTran, they charge an additional $20 to get an emergency-row seat… okay, no big deal, lots of airlines do that now… BUT, they also charge an additional $6 JUST to pick your own seat AT ALL! If you opt out, they will just assign you a middle seat until the day you check in, at which time you can change it for free if there are any windows or aisles left! What’s next, charging to use the bathroom? Fortunately for me, I could immediately check in, saving myself $12 of uncertainty. And I didn’t have to go to the bathroom.)

When I got to Laguardia, I saw that my flight to Atlanta had been delayed 40 minutes. That made me a little nervous because my layover was only about an hour. However, another flight to Atlanta (it’s their hub) was almost done boarding … so I went to the customer service line and was going to see if I could get on that flight, when right as I was walking up the customer service guy announced on the pa, “Could the following customers on flight 339 come see me at gate B8, blah, blah, blah, Josh Jones, blah, blah!”

“I’m Josh Jones!” I shrieked!

Excellent. The guy, who had an African accent, took my boarding pass for 339 and handed me a new one for the flight about to depart; a first class one no less!

I was impressed that AirTran had gone to the trouble of figuring out who had a tight layover in Atlanta and automatically given them priority! I hadn’t even asked! Amazing.

Amazing indeed, I thought. Right up until I was about to hand my ticket to the lady at the gate, when I noticed it read “Josh JOHNS.”

I paused for a second, and considered just getting on as “Mr. Johns.” If was found out, I could always just play dumb! It wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch.

But then I glanced back over at the other gate and saw the guy that must have been the actual Josh Johns waiting patiently to tell the African-accented man that his name been called.

Dammit, I thought. There goes my connection to LA. I went over and handed the guy his ticket.

He was very appreciative! And, after explaining to the gate agent what had happened (and honestly the guy did pronounce JOHNS exactly like JONES), he was able to get me on that flight after all, with another first class ticket, seated directly next to my 20 year-old Georgian doppleganger, Josh Johns.

Which is why the number two thing I learned yesterday was: it pays to be (named) Josh Jones.