The cloud compute and cloud storage industry are in for a big surprise. Is it possible the CDN Edge is going to overtake the cloud compute and cloud storage industry in the next decade? The trend has started, and the cloud compute and cloud behemoths might be at risk, including Amazon. In the world of Amazon, it’s about deploying web applications in zones, centralization, complexity, and everything one would expect with the current business model. Today, businesses create web applications and deploy them in a zone or two, or a few. The innovation driven CDNs will turn this business model upside down because they will enable enterprises to deploy web apps across the entire CDN infrastructure on thousands of servers across 30 to 50 CDN PoPs with a push of an API button.
Fastly, Mirror Image and even Akamai are moving lightning fast in maturing this new business model that allows customers to extend and push web applications to the CDN Edge, where heavy processing and storage take place. Isn’t it better to place web applications close to the end user at the last mile, as opposed to having them in a zone located at a far away location? Now thrown in the fact that in today’s environment, a single high performance bare-metal server can replace hundreds of VM’s, thus help customers manage cost, because a server is a fixed cost, as opposed to the pay-as-you-go model, where high peaks can be economically devastating to many SMB businesses. The components of the CDN Edge include a global high performance CDN, bare-metal hardware, Hadoop, SDN and massive bandwidth. In addition, the CDN Edge helps improve fault tolerance, redundancy, load balancing, and everything related to real time at the last mile.