Youtube – Coming Soon to a Data Centre Near You
With the almost endless (tera) bytes of content that it pushes out over the Internet each day, the online video behemoth Youtube has proven to be a problem for some ISPs who desperately try to keep their transit connections flowing in the face of increasing user demands for bandwidth.
In fact, on a major ISP in Singapore, Youtube videos are rendered almost unwatchable by poor streaming performance, possibly induced by traffic shaping of Youtube content on their transparent proxy infrastructure.
Clearly, such a situation is at best, a nightmare for ISPs who have to maximize their returns on investment while trying to maintain a moderately usable level of service. Similarly, Google’s (ambitious) plans for Youtube would be worth nothing if the user experience was bad.
The bottom line therefore, is – if Youtube is to grow, so must its content distribution network.
On this note, what better way to grow than to leverage upon Google’s massive infrastructure?
The tell-tale signs that have been there for some time already are growing stronger. With Google now having a local presence in Singapore and actively peering with local ISPs over the past 6 months or so, Google is just an AS (Autonomous System) Hop away from most networks.
Traceroutes from various networks
These routes are pretty reflective of Google’s existing infrastructure and with this already in place, it would be relatively trivial to deploy a reverse proxy to cache Youtube content and deliver it to end users with minimal transit overheads imposed on the end-user’s ISP.
Apparently, this is indeed the case with content now being cached on a set of anycasted reverse proxies on the cache.googlevideo.com subdomain. Depending on which ISP you’re with, the caching servers can just be a couple of hops away, possibly physically at an ISP colocation facility near you.
As of now, the effects of this change have yet to be fully realized as the caching servers are not being used for all videos, and certain ISPs are still using their upstream transit networks to reach Youtube servers in the US. Hopefully, however, with this now in place, users will soon get to enjoy their daily dose of Youtube without having to go bald pulling their hair in frustration when videos take forever to buffer.
So there we have it, Youtube – (Hopefully) Coming to a Data Centre Near You
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