Apple’s own CDN (content delivery network) has gone live in the U.S. and Europe, reports Seeking Alpha (http://tinyurl.com/ls3z3hg). The company is now delivering some of their own content such as new releases of Mac OS X and iOS directly to consumers.
What’s more, Apple has interconnect deals in place with multiple ISPs, including Comcast and others, and has paid to get direct access to their networks, says Seeking Alpha. As a result the company has more than 10x the capacity it had previously.
“With Apple planning to release the beta version of their next desktop OS today, Yosemite (10.10), and with iOS 8 expected to come out this fall, Apple’s putting in place a lot of capacity to support upcoming software releases. Apple is still using Akamai and Level 3′s CDN services for iTunes (Akamai), Radio (Level 3) and app downloads, but over time, much of that traffic will be brought over to Apple’s CDN,” Dan Rayburn, an expert on the streaming media industry, writes for Seeking Alpha. “It’s too early to know how much traffic will come over and when, but Apple’s already started using their own CDN much faster than I expected. The pace of their build out and amount of money they are spending on infrastructure is incredible. Based on my calculations, Apple has already put in place multiple terabits per second of capacity and by the end of this year, will have invested well more than $100M in their CDN build out.”
A content delivery network is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. The purpose is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance.
