Re: new to cdn internetworking

[Christian Kuhtz <ck@arch.bellsouth.net>]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2001 at 12:14:30PM -0500, Eric Dean wrote:
> 
> When running everyone's through forward proxies (which does every business
> via a firewall and some major ISPs), the proxy becomes a layer7 network
> device that can do pretty much anything with content requests.

I've been pretty quiet in this discussion, although I've been
lurking on this list since the very beginning.

It might be worthwhile pointing out that several major providers
have failry recently turned off, removed or otherwise have disabled
or are in the process of disabling their forward proxy caching
infrastructures.  Others find that the only way to make their
deployments work out operationally is with substantial
contributions by the vendors who sold the gear.

If there is an implicit assumption here that forward proxies (and
associated infrastructures) are common place, or easily financially 
justified or operationalized, or otherwise readily available and
implementable, or work generally well, that may be considerably
out of touch with reality.

By the same token, placing something else into the path of traffic
is not something providers typically look forward to, and a
some of the commonly used architectures do not lend themselves to
such implementations being straightforward at all;  this
completely excludes the operations view of the world which is an
additional issue as already hinted at above.

Typically, doing anything inband is something most providers view
with a considerable amount of scepticism to say the least.
For example, most providers never don't or never have liked present
day caching infrastructures in their networks.  You might say "well,
they're there now, so, why wouldn't they adopt this"; well, they're
also in the process of giving up on considerable financial
investments made to date for a host of reasons because of the
considerable pain it has and is causing, and lack of ROI.

It would seem quite a few people appear to think that they can ride
the way of the forward proxy caching infrastructures into the
future -- that may be a quite mistaken assumption..

By the same token, don't bank on being able to change anything low
in the stack.  This stuff should ride up high in the stack, without
munching packets in the core of the network.  Such things as a
content addressing scheme which is an abstraction of network
topology etc; rather than having inband widgets in the network which
translate, redirect, rewrite stuff on the fly.

Various vendors will tell you that they can do all this on the fly
in their gear in your backbone.  That ASICs are fast enough to do
all this.  Or that you could place one of their devices in front
of every edge box.  Bla bla bla.  Pigs can fly.

It's not hard to figure out why that idea floats about as well as 
a brick.

Just thought it might be helpful pointing out these somewhat common
sense facts after I see this discussion circling again and again
around these points.

Hope this was helpful to somebody out there.

Cheers,
Chris