Is the Cloud technically a CDN?

[Darren884]

I have been studying CDN, and it occurred to me that cloud hosting services sound a lot like CDN. What are your views?

[Dan Grossman]

They're not the same thing.

A CDN is an edge network; servers geographically distributed around the world so that content can be served to people from the closest location, reducing latency and distributing load.

Cloud hosting is a fancy term for a bunch of virtualized servers or services running on some physical hardware. The physical servers can all be in one data center, so they're not providing any type of CDN.

[Darren884]

Aren't some clouds spread out around the world too?

[Dan Grossman]

Aren't some clouds spread out around the world too?

Not really. In the case of the cheapo "cloud hosting" like MT sells, you're basically getting assigned to a virtual machine, all your content is being served from one place, not geographically distributed.

In the case of Amazon EC2, you can choose one of 3? regions to launch your VM in, which again, serves all its content from that one place, not geographically distributed.

It's not a CDN at all, and neither is Amazon S3

If it were, Amazon wouldn't be offering a separate CDN service, CloudFront

[Darren884]

Interesting... thanks for clarifying this .

[plumsauce]

There are a lot of similarities.

As Dan points out the CDN also implies geographical diversity.

But, other than that they share many of the same base elements in their implementation.

So, you might say, a CDN is a CLOUD, but a CLOUD is not necessarily a CDN.

You will also see in real life, that the top CDN's seem to have much better uptime than the typical CLOUD. This may have a lot to do with the size of customer.

[sbdi]

Cloud in the sense you talk about it is called utility compute. It's just a large never ending supply of compute cycles which you can run anything on. This is very useful when scaling systems.