Fully Open Edge Cloud

What Is A Rapid.Space CDN

Short Presentation of Rapid.Space CDN. It should display it's architecture from user point of view and what functionalities are available (update required)
  • Last Update:2021-11-03
  • Version:002
  • Language:en

Agenda

  • CDN Concept
  • Guaranteed worldwide delivery
  • CDN in China and beyond

CDN Concept

CDN (Content Delivery Network) provides a front-end solution to deliver data to end-users or to collect data from IoT. It is similar to Cloudflare or qiniu CDN in China.

  • HTTP2/HTTP3 with SSL/TLS
  • Content caching (Cache-Control, stale-while-revalidate , etc.)
  • Content buffering (fluentd, MQTT, SNMP, kafka, etc.)

The CDN service accelerates content delivery to end-users by reducing the time for end-users to negotiate SSL/TLS sessions and by keeping a copy of content close to end-users.

It can also be used to circumvent network congestion for global deployment of business applications of Web sites.

The CDN service also provides a way to buffer IoT data and forward it to the data processing backend. It reduces the risk of losing IoT data due to network congestion or backend downtime.

Global CDN

Rapid.Space provides HTTPS front-ends (HTTP1, HTTP2, HTTP3) in 10 different locations worldwide. In China, Rapid.Space front-ends are places on all major carriers: China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile.

Guaranteed worldwide delivery

Thanks to its global IPv6 backbone and its CDN front-ends, it is possible to create simple applications that will select automatically the best front-end for each user. Thanks to this technology, users can always access corporate applications (ERP, CRM, etc.) with 100% success rate. This approach is much more suitable for corporate applications than DNS based technologies which only provide 99% success rate. 99% is fine for e-commerce. But if the accountant of a company can not access the ERP of a company (because he or she is the 1% of the 99%), it is not acceptable.

Rapid.Space CDN

CDN provides a front-end solution to deliver data to end-users or to collect data from IoT. It is similar to Cloudflare or qiniu CDN in China.

SDN provides a way to interconnect Rapid.Space CDN and VPS through a latency-optimized IPv6 network. This service is quite unique: it also provides a way to interconnect Rapid.Space to other cloud services (AWS, Azure, GCP, OVH, Alicloud, UCloud, Qingcloud, etc.) with good networking performance.

CDN in China and Beyond

  • HTTP2/HTTP3 with SSL/TLS
  • Content caching (Cache-Control, stale-while-revalidate , etc.)
  • Content buffering (fluentd, MQTT, SNMP, kafka, etc.)
  • POPs on China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile

Rapid.Space has redundant CDN presence in China on each major network provider: China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile.

Web Delivery in China

There is no reliable way to deliver a Web application (ERP, CRM, etc.) or a Web Site in China without having multiple points of presence (POP) to accelerate content delivery.

For Web sites hosted in China, congestion happens often, especially if https protocol is used. Sometimes, DNS resolution fails. This can prevent accessing in China a web site hosted abroad, even if this Web site is just a corporate ERP, CRM or source code repository.

Even if a Web site is hosted in China, other kinds of problems may happen:

  • in some Chinese cities, congestion happens which makes the Web site very slow;
  • DNS resolution fails sometimes.

All those problems are solved by the combination of Rapid.Space CDN and Rapid.Space SDN service.

This use case applies to Web Sites hosted on Rapid.Space but also to Web Sites hosted on conventional public clouds (Alicloud, AWS, etc.). Rapid.Space SDN can be installed on any server or virtual machine, including on premise or on any public cloud.

To use Rapid.Space CDN in China, a valid ICP is mandatory. Rapid.Space can help with the process to obtain a valid ICP as long as you have a legal representation in mainland China.

Web Delivery Worldwide

Rapid.Space CDN and SDN are very useful too to deliver Web applications (ERP, CRM, etc.) or Web sites worldwide.

Even if a Web site is hosted in China, different kinds of problems may happen:

  • in some countries, the Web site is extremely slow or unavailable;
  • DNS resolution fails in some countries.

Some web sites of Chinese governements can for example be blocked in France on Free's FTTH network but are available from Japan or from Free's 4G mobile network. It is very unpredictable. Some web sites hosted in China (ex. https://www.ctocio.com/) can take up to a minute to display in Europe.

Both problems can be solved using the CDN service of Rapid.Space and by using HTTPS front-ends outside China to connect to the backend server inside China.