Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

With the rise of new Internet services such as the Internet of everything, mobile live streaming, short video, AR and AI, traffic has ushered in massive growth, which has brought severe challenges to the carrying capacity of existing networks. In the era of 5G and the Internet of things, CDN, as an "Internet speed accelerator", has also ushered in new opportunities for development.

The bloody price war is over, and the industry pattern is reshuffled.

What is CDN? CDN is a content distribution network built on the network. Relying on the edge servers deployed everywhere, through the load balancing, content distribution, scheduling and other functional modules of the central platform, CDN enables users to obtain the content they need nearby, alleviate Internet network congestion, improve Internet business response speed, and improve user business experience.

Development status of 1.CDN

At present, the scale of the CDN market is increasing year by year. The global CDN market has a compound annual growth rate of 27.7% from 2010 to 2015, reaching US $6.05 billion in 2016, US $9 billion in 2018, and is expected to reach US $15.73 billion in 2020. The domestic market has also maintained steady growth. According to statistics, more than 300 enterprises have obtained CDN licenses. In 2018, China's CDN market reached 17.5 billion yuan, an increase of 28.6% over the same period last year. According to market consultancy CCW Research, the size of China's CDN market will reach 35.51 billion yuan in 2019 and 135.86 billion in 2022.

two。 The price war is over, and the market pattern is very different.

Previously, the domestic CDN market was a "duopoly" composed of net lodgers and Lanxun. Lanxun, which was listed on NASDAQ in the United States in 2010, is the first CDN service company in China, accounting for 53% of the market share in 2009. Later, the net lodger entered the CDN industry and surpassed Lan Xin in 2013 to become the company with the first market share of CDN, with a market share of more than 40%. However, this "duopoly pattern" was broken by Internet manufacturers who attacked on a large scale, opening up the market with a price war bombed repeatedly, and even grabbing market share at prices below cost.

In March 2015, Aliyun announced a 21% price reduction for CDN, which officially kicked off the price war. Tencent Cloud also began to follow the price reduction. Jinshanyun, Baidu Cloud and Paiyun all joined the war to cut prices one after another. In November 2017, Aliyun prices continued to be reduced by 25%, while some prices of Tencent Cloud were reduced by 40%. While the traditional CDN service manufacturers are struggling to survive in the gap, the CDN industry is howling all over the country.

After a raging price war, the current situation is gradually clear, the CDN market has completed the reshuffle, the domestic CDN market from the "duopoly pattern" to now formed a tripod situation of Ali, net and Tencent.

Among them, Aliyun, Netcom Technology and Tencent Cloud have a market share of nearly 70%, making them the first echelon of the CDN market, while other enterprises such as Baidu Cloud, Jinshanyun, Qiniuyun and Lanxin have formed the second echelon. Among them, according to the 2018-2019 China CDN Market Development report released by Jishi Information, Aliyun has become the largest manufacturer in China's CDN market with a market share of 30.6%, with more than 200,000 CDN customers, more than 1200 domestic nodes, bandwidth reserves exceeding 80TB, and a market share of nearly 1/3.

Does the traditional CDN manufacturer's service come to an end?

At present, the domestic CDN market can be divided into three categories: the first category is the traditional CDN manufacturers represented by Internet and Blue News; the second category is the Internet and cloud computing companies wantonly encircling and suppressing in the price war; the third category is telecom operators, the three major domestic operators use their own pipeline advantages, but also try to get a piece of the CDN market.

The fierce attack by Internet manufacturers in a round of price wars has rewritten the fate of traditional CDN manufacturers. Taking a closer look at the traditional CDN manufacturers, some established manufacturers such as Lanxun and Dilian have gradually lost their advantage in the market and have been squeezed out of the first echelon, while the market share of the CDN giant Internet hostel technology has been continuously eroded, showing a slowdown in performance growth in 2016, and operating profits in 2017 decreased by 33.39% compared with the same period last year. Total profits fell by 36.07% over the same period.

In contrast to the international market, Akamai, the originator of CDN, is the largest CDN service provider in the world, deploying more than 240000 servers in more than 130 countries and regions, and has the world's largest CDN platform, accounting for more than half of the world's share. But even Akamai, the founder, lost nearly 20 per cent of its market share from 57 per cent to 39 per cent as Amazon joined the board.

Akamai revenue change table

Under the continuous impact of Internet service providers and the gradual pressure of telecom operators, the service of traditional CDN manufacturers has come to an end? In the face of CDN's Red Sea market, where should the established manufacturers go?

CDN+MEC tuyere is coming, can lonely established manufacturers take advantage of the wind?

1. Traditional CDN technology has been unable to meet the new business requirements.

According to IDC, more than 50 billion terminals and devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020, and the huge amount of data will push the overall network architecture from the center to the edge, of which more than 50% of the data needs to be analyzed, processed and stored at the edge of the network. With the advent of the era of 5G and the Internet of things, new services such as artificial intelligence, ultra-high-definition video streaming, AR/VR, autopilot and so on have blowout, which have more stringent requirements on bandwidth and delay.

The traditional CDN technology is to cache the data in the edge server to improve the transmission performance of near-ground data, but it can only trace the data back to the central cloud when dealing with real-time dynamic computing services, so it is difficult to meet the needs of high interaction and low latency of services such as AR/VR. If applications such as data information can be sunk to the edge of the network, users can directly access the data information sunk to the edge under this network architecture, and the delay will be much lower.

2.CDN+MEC tuyere is coming

What is MEC? Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) migrates intensive computing tasks to nearby network edge servers, reduces congestion and burden on core and transmission networks, reduces network bandwidth pressure, achieves low latency, brings high bandwidth, improves data processing efficiency in the Internet of everything era, responds quickly to user requests and improves quality of service. At the same time, through the opening of the network capability, the application can also call and access the network information in real time, which is helpful to improve the application experience.

MEC is closer to the edge of wireless network, the sinking position is deeper, and the delay is smaller, so it is one of the future evolution directions of CDN. MEC will constantly push CDN to sink to the edge and get closer to users to reduce latency and enhance user experience. Node sinking can also effectively reduce the cost of data backtracking and the pressure on the central node.

3. The difficulties encountered in the transformation of traditional CDN manufacturers

This seemingly sunny road is not as easy as imagined, and traditional CDN manufacturers also have some problems in front of them on the road to MEC.

Traditional CDN manufacturers still have to spend a lot of effort on cost and cycle if they want to deploy edge computing, which is a big problem for manufacturers whose profits decline after the price war.

With the development of the Internet of things, the edge calculation of its requirements is not as simple as it is now, and there will be intelligent requirements, that is, the intention-based network, Huawei, Cisco and other enterprises have been involved in this area, but the traditional CDN manufacturers' grasp in this technology field is relatively blank.

Compared with traditional CDN vendors, cloud service providers and Internet service providers have natural advantages in the application of edge computing, and their solutions can be applied to their original service scenarios. In comparison, traditional CDN vendors have lost the opportunity in this respect.

Innovative Application of combination of 4.CDN and MEC

A number of operators at home and abroad have experimented with CDN under MEC scenarios, mainly in application scenarios such as live events, AR in scenic spots and live broadcasting in venues.

For live broadcast of events, create an end-to-end solution for video diversity, distribution and playback based on MEC.

Live broadcast of the event

Scenic spot AR refers to the combination of MEC and AR application, which can push the scenery, video and audio of scenic spots all the year round.

Scenic spot AR

Live broadcast in venues refers to live and on-demand programs for concerts, large-scale events and competitions, while providing multi-angle viewing, AR, VR and other services. Through the sinking of video CDN nodes, the hot content accessed by users is cached to the edge of the network, which reduces the access delay of users and improves the Internet experience.

Live broadcast of venues

In the IoT era of the Internet of everything, CDN+MEC will become the main battlefield in the future, and it will also be a must for military strategists. Can lonely established manufacturers successfully climb the tuyere and take advantage of the wind?

The track changed, the old and new manufacturers sharpened their knives.

The distributed deployment of CDN nodes in the edge cloud is a general trend, and the first half of the CDN competition basically ends. Facing this new track in the second half, both operators, CDN service providers and Internet manufacturers are sharpening their knives to the edge and begin to combine CDN business with MEC to launch their own edge computing services.

1. Service provider

China Mobile established the Edge Computing Open Laboratory on October 30, 2018, and has carried out MEC application pilot projects in more than 29 prefectures and cities in 10 provinces. In 2019, 100 test nodes with deployable edge computing devices will be evaluated and 100 edge computing capacity API will be opened. In addition, China Mobile and ZTE began to pilot MEC+CDN in Hunan in 2017, using virtualization technology to deploy CDN to MEC. From the test data, MEC+CDN effectively reduced the latency and significantly improved the download speed.

In 2018, China Unicom carried out MEC edge cloud scale pilot projects in 15 provinces and cities, creating more than 30 pilot commercial model projects, including smart ports, smart driving, smart venues, intelligent manufacturing, video surveillance, cloud games and smart medical services. In 2019, China Unicom plans to accelerate the deployment of MEC marginal services in 31 provinces and cities across the country. China Unicom has completed the vCDN verification of solid-shift fusion based on MEC edge cloud nodes in Tianjin, Zhejiang and other provinces, and now its MEC edge cloud ecological partners have reached more than 150.

China Telecom introduces edge computing through operators' government-enterprise gateways / home gateways / set-top boxes / cameras, and carries out research on edge gateways of the Internet of things; introduces MEC into the network to launch MEC-based business platforms and solutions. At the beginning of this year, China Telecom Beijing Research Institute, Zhejiang Company, Huaxin Design Institute jointly carried out technical verification work based on MEC+CDN edge acceleration performance in Hangzhou existing network environment, designed MCE+CDN edge acceleration scheme and Internet comparison scheme, after testing, MEC+CDN edge acceleration scheme significantly improved the user experience of UDH-VR live / VOD business, video business playback was smooth, and stutter index was basically zero. In this technical verification work, the report "MEC CDN Technical Verification for UHD-VR Video Service" is jointly issued, which is of reference value to the research of 5G MEC+CDN.

2.CDN service provider

As a global CDN leader, Akamai cooperated with IBM on edge computing as early as 2003, and Akamai and IBM offered edge Edge-based services on their WebSphere in June last year. The Akamai Intelligent Edge platform (Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform) increases insight and flexibility for enterprises to better protect and support cloud-based applications and Web-based experiences.

The community cloud strategy was put forward by Netcom Technology in 2015. Community cloud is an extension of the existing CDN platform, sinking its nodes to the edge of the network close to users, and adding computing resources such as storage, processing and transmission. Recently, the network has upgraded the original CDN network to an edge computing network, and launched an edge computing platform. Based on the method of edge computing, the edge barrage distribution technology is successfully developed. All the barrage is distributed directly on the network platform, and there is no need to go back to the source, which solves a major pain point of high pressure on the live broadcast platform.

Lanxun regards CDN as an important part of the overall network architecture and cloud switching services. Through a three-tier architecture, ISP and ICP are interconnected on the same platform, reducing bandwidth costs and improving user experience. Lanxun's proprietary Internet switching center and data center transmission technology is committed to creating an efficient and perfect edge computing platform. It also took the lead in laying out CDN to the Ali edge cloud platform and exploring the service model of edge computing with the help of Ali edge cloud services.

CloudFlare launched CloudFlare Workers in 2017, opening up edge computing services in the form of micro-services, allowing users to program at the edge, which indicates that it has initially built a platform for edge computing.

Last year, Limelight launched an enhanced version of EdgePrism OS software on its CDN network, which allows users to enter and deliver local content at the edge, increasing Limelight's edge server capacity by more than 120%.

3. Internet manufacturer

Aliyun has successively released IoT edge computing product Link IoT Edge and edge node service ENS. Its edge node service ENS scheduling system integrates and inherits the flexibility of Aliyun's total bandwidth reserve of CDN. In 2019, edge computing ENS officially entered the era of 2.0. in the era of ENS 2.0, Aliyun introduced MEC resources, the edge infrastructure is more inclusive and easy to expand, and the needs of users to further sink to MEC can be seamlessly covered, so that the computing power of ENS can be fully applied to MEC, fully releasing resource dividends.

Tencent Cloud Edge Computing Network is developed based on CDN and has the edge service capabilities of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Based on CDN edge node, pop node and MEC node resources, Tencent Cloud Edge Computing Network opens up a large amount of edge storage and computing resources, and can deploy users' services to computing nodes closer to end users.

The "1KM Edge Computing" solution released by Jinshanyun and Xiaomi has changed the traditional CDN model, and the resulting intelligent network has the characteristics of computing marginalization, network real-time awareness adaptation, network acceleration specialization and so on, which is 30% faster than traditional CDN.

Under the tide of 5G and the Internet of things, how to grasp the mobile edge ability of various manufacturers to seize the next round of market share will become the key to win in the second half of the CDN track.

References:

1. Http://www.cww.net.cn/article?id=450830&tdsourcetag=s_pcqq_aiomsg

2. Https://www.docin.com/p-2164653551.html

3. Https://lmtw.com/mzw/content/detail/id/169717

4. Https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1607738634745254913&wfr=spider&for=pc

* the picture is from the Internet. Please let me know if there is any infringement.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.