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Knowledge Base

NSX Lastline CDN Usage (900006)

Last Updated: 5/19/2020Categories: InformationalTotal Views: 1126Language:
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Customer question:

Why [is] making something like cdn.lastline.com [not] possible?

The basic idea of a Content Distribution Network (CDN) is to distribute content world-wide, and to do this in a way that the content lives as geographically close to the client as possible.

We achieve this by using Google's world-wide network of data centers. When a client wants to download data from NSX Lastline, we authenticate the request in our backend at update.lastline.com and then redirect the client (assuming they allow the use of CDNs) into the Google network. This is done without forwarding any customer credentials to Google services. If CDNs are not allowed, there is no redirect and the server at update.lastline.com serves the content directly.

With NSX Lastline's implementation of the CDN,  this happens by using a redirect from update.lastline.com to storage.googleapis.com (the "CDN"), but this later service is under Google's control and could, in theory, change any day. Further, the server IPs that are resolved to storage.googleapis.com are distributed world-wide and will be as geographically close to the client (the customer's servers/network) as possible. This is what allows the download to be significantly faster than when downloading from the NSX Lastline servers in the US or in EMEA.

Even if Google does not have a data center or the requested data in the client's region, the DNS will resolve to a server as close to the client as possible and Google will use their internal network to fetch data for the client. This means that instead of going over the public internet to the NSX Lastline servers for downloading large amounts of data, they will make use of Google’s internal (very fast and reliable) networking to transmit data securely.

Download rates are also much higher than what we can expect from NSX Lastline servers and at the same time it reduces the resources needed on the NSX Lastline backend for serving such requests. Also, it uses 100% Google-services, making this the most reliable service possible.

If Lastline were to offer a domain like cdn.lastline.com, we would also rely on the Google infrastructure for serving data. Of course, we could re-implement the Google CDN server and have NSX Lastline servers around the globe, but that would not be more reliable, faster, or efficient, and it would still not solve a customer's problems with a CDN.

Why don't we replace storage.googleapis.com with cdn.lastline.com? We could, but how would we know the IPs that we need to return? We need to return the geo-located IP of storage.googleapis.com when someone resolves cdn.lastline.com . We don't know this IP, as it depends on where the client is requesting it, so we cannot resolve it for the client.

We could always return a specific (the same) IP, regardless of where a client resides, but that's equivalent to disabling CDNs - but, instead of disabling it for one client, we would disable CDNs for all clients. This is not what we want.

A client could “pin” the IP resolved for storage.googleapis.com to a specific IP using their DNS server, but that would break if Google decides to switch IPs. It is a possibility, but we do not recommend that.

Note: Globally routable CDN IPs are not currently used by the NSX Lastline CDN.

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