appfleet is an edge platform

We host your dynamic services globally closer to your users

Globally Load-Balanced

Host your service, site or application on multiple locations at the same time. Be closer to your users and improve your performance and uptime.

Any tech-stack

appfleet is a cloud-based container hosting platform that allows you to deploy your code in any language, framework or technology.

Serverless Containers

Run stateless and stateful containers on a fully managed globally distributed infrastructure. No servers or routing to manage.

What is a CDN?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers around the world that is built and optimized to serve static content as fast as possible geographically closer to the user of the service. By bringing the content closer to users, it reduces latency between users and servers, improving the overall performance of websites using the CDN.

Without CDN we usually have a central server or a group of servers (also called origin servers) located in a particular region which respond to all the requests coming from all users regardless of their location. This results in low download speeds and timeout issues for people located far away from the origin servers. Also as the number of requests increases the origin servers can get overwhelmed, especially in cases of quick bursts of new connections.
But most of the time the content served by origin servers is static and/or cacheable, so a CDN is a good fit for these cases as it acts as a proxy layer that performs the data distribution to users, while the origin server provides the content the CDN is supposed to cache and distribute.

Offloading traffic from origin servers to CDN improves the web experience by bringing down the latency for end users and also lowers the compute and bandwidth resources required by origin servers, therefore benefiting both the content provider and its end users.

Traditionally CDNs have been used for storing only static and highly cacheable content. Modern CDN platforms like appfleet provide features for running custom code in your preferred language at the edge which opens up a lot of new possibilities.

Why do you need a CDN?

A CDN can provide benefits like:

Enabling faster application load times for mobile and handheld devices
Increased availability of content even if the origin servers are under stress
Improved overall responsiveness and performance of web applications globally
Reduction in infrastructure expenses by offloading the overall traffic from origin servers and lowering the compute requirements
Quick and simple scalability by efficiently handling sudden spikes in traffic
Enabling device level (desktop, mobile, tablets) delivery optimization
Adding additional security layers like WAF and rate-limiting
Protection of the origin servers from DDOS attacks

Drawbacks of traditional CDNs?

Though CDNs are purposefully meant to reduce latency and improve usability, there are a few drawbacks to implement a traditional CDN.

Lack of Customization - Traditional CDNs were not built for modern application delivery. They lack many customization options and give you very little control over how you serve your content. You often get the bare minimum features without any option to control the logic and behavior of the CDN. As a result, for many use-cases, a traditional CDN usually creates more challenges that offset any of the benefits it offers.

Static content only - Most traditional CDNs act as ‘dumb pipes’, that serve static content without allowing many smart optimizations that could save you lots of traffic and money. Moreover, most traditional CDNs offerings are meant specifically to serve static content, as they do not support dynamic content. As a result, for sites with considerable dynamic content, a traditional CDN usually does not offer many benefits and often creates additional problems. Modern day applications require from CDNs lots of flexibility, what they support, how they can optimize different kinds of content and even wildly different rules and logic on different URLs.

All or Nothing - You are often forced to use the full network of a traditional CDN provider, and pay a premium on it even if you only need a few POPs in key regions. You have no option to modify the number of regions your content is stored on. That can also create problems with legal jurisdictions when you are required by law to store sensitive data only in certain regions.

What is a Custom CDN? And how is it better than a Traditional CDN?

A custom CDN or a Private CDN is a content delivery network built for a specific use-case, that requires the provisioning of own infrastructure, writing custom code, logic and config files. But with a custom CDN, you get the liberty to customize and tweak your content delivery and enable high-performance and low latency use-cases, suiting your platform, content type and user’s geographic location. This resolves the limitation of serving only static resources and enables doing complex tasks closer to the users which in turn offloads the origin servers to a very large extent.

Unlike a traditional CDN, a custom CDN allows organizations to utilize advanced caching options, support dynamic content, apply custom proxy rules, choose the location of POPs, support hybrid content delivery and many other benefits specific to each company.
Overall it lets organizations control how their CDN is configured down to the smallest details when a traditional CDN limits them too much without solving most of their problems.
Surprisingly, a custom CDN often turns out to be cheaper than a traditional CDN as it allows for customizability that is often charged at a premium and allows owners to shop around for lower bandwidth prices.

Unfortunately building a custom CDN is a big, complex and expensive task. However, with appfleet, building a custom CDN is simplified through the platform’s essential features like multi-region deployments, smart global routing, failover support, efficient monitoring, and more.

Why choose appfleet to build a Custom CDN?

appfleet makes it very simple to deploy containers across the globe closer to end users. Our edge platform includes features such as smart global routing, local SSD caching, zero downtime deployments and many others that in total make appfleet an ideal fit for solving many complex problems.

For example, through appfleet’s global infrastructure, you can set up your own flexible and custom made CDN.
To build your own CDN network, you could deploy a custom-configured Nginx Docker container across multiple regions. Or you can even write your own custom logic in Node.js, Rust, Java, C, or any other programming language to configure your own custom CDN logic, where each of the global instances would act as a CDN Point of Presence (POP) in itself. All without any additional devops effort.
This essentially gives you full configuration freedom, including, setting proxy and caching rules, modifying traffic flow, rewriting contents on-the-fly, intelligently optimizing files and websites and more.

You could even integrate it with your APIs to make your CDN context aware and have additional logic based on real-time data coming from your database. Imagine for example the CDN being able to understand that it serves content to logged-in users by accessing the session data storage and serving different content to guests and logged-in users all on the same URL.

Additionally you can use appfleet to build a video streaming platform. Just deploy your video streaming software to all the regions you require and start doing on-the-fly media optimization and per-device transcoding. Streaming video with appfleet is a great alternative to traditional CDNs as it offers you full flexibility to run any streaming software you wish while retaining the same performance and latency benefits of a traditional CDN.

And as an added advantage appfleet also provides a global Redis cache and zero configuration real time monitoring. With the global cache you can synchronize the state and status of your CDN across all of your locations and with the real time monitoring you can stay at the top of your resource utilisation and make informed decisions.
Also, thanks to the affordable and unified global bandwidth prices, running your own custom CDN on the appfleet edge platform is often cheaper than using a traditional CDN service.

Run a CDN with appfleet

and get a fully automated platform with multiple global POPs, high-availability and low latency

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…and other features

appfleet doesn’t end with your product’s deployement

Custom health checks

Configure your own custom health checks per application and we will add them to our own internal checks that we continuously run to ensure your service is alive and well

All languages supported

Node.js, PHP, Golang, Java, Python, everything is supported, thanks to Docker containers. Don't let your technology of choice limit you.

Included HTTPS

For any web service we can automatically install and maintain a LetsEncrypt TLS certificate for free.

Better performance

By using multiple regions at the same time you can lower the latency and easily improve performance for your global audience

Public & private registries

Use any public or private container registry like Docker Cloud, Github Registries, Quay, Google Cloud and more

Console access

Assume direct control of your container by connecting directly to it by using our web console

File Cache

All nodes come with a locally mounted caching filesystem that persists between deployments for improved performance

Logging

We store and process the output and logs of all deployed applications for easier debugging.

Monitoring

All of your instances are constantly monitored. Get historic and real-time CPU, RAM and Disk usage.

Custom CDN with appfleet