As the move to orchestrated, elastic, deep vCDNs for high-audience video evolves, Akamai has already established leadership, with a virtualized version of its Aura Licensed CDN (LCDN). Distinct from Akamai’s public CDN, the Akamai Intelligent Platform™, Aura LCDN is licensed software, deployed and managed by network operators primarily to deliver their own content.
- In 2012, Aura LCDN was the industry’s first virtualized CDN to be included in virtualization proof of concept testing prior to the ETSI-launched NFV industry specification group. The testing was conducted by the same team that penned the first NFV white paper, which in turn informed the Aura CDN use case.
- Since 2013, Aura vLCDN has been deployed in a Tier-1 telecommunications operator’s commercial offering, running on top of VMware ESX. Akamai demonstrated peak network I/O performance to support heavy video traffic workloads per cache.
- In 2014, Akamai demonstrated elasticity for its vLCDN at the SDN World Congress, together with a layer-3, overlay SDN solution on an OpenStack-based platform.
- In 2015, Akamai completed successful proof-of-concept testing of its vLCDN as an instance of an orchestrated vCDN offer with a major European operator and demonstrated that solution at the 2016 Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain.
- In 2016, Akamai’s Aura vLCDN was incorporated as a Deep vCDN proof of concept of the Central Office Redesigned as a Datacenter (CORD) project run by Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) and demonstrated at the 2016 Open Network Summit (ONS) and Broadband Forum (BBF).
- As of 2017, Akamai’s Aura vLCDN is in production trial with a Tier 1 operator who is using a commercial orchestration solution together with OpenStack, CEPH, and SDN
Aura vLCDN’s core service components, HyperCache and Request Router, both operate on servers in virtual machine (VM) environments. In addition to the deployments noted previously, Akamai has demonstrated vLCDN’s readiness with VMWare ESXi and KVM hypervisors, vSphere and OpenStack Virtualized Infrastructure Managers (VIM), OpenFlow-based underlay SDN solutions and several overlay SDN solutions, decoupled block storage solutions such as CEPH and iSCSI, and several orchestration solutions.
