Administration Guide

OnApp CDN is a software product that works with OnApp Cloud. If you enable CDN for your end users, they can get access to a network of global edge servers (yours, and/or those provided by other cloud hosts) and use this network to deliver web content more quickly and reliably to visitors all over the world. Your CDN is managed alongside your cloud via the OnApp Control Panel. For more information, see OnApp CDN for Service Providers. 

OnApp provides the following types:

  • HTTP Push
  • HTTP Pull
  • Live Streaming
  • On-Demand Streaming

HTTP Push

The HTTP Push method is similar to secondary server: the user uploads content to CDN and links to it, so the content is physically stored at CDN storage servers.

HTTP Pull  

With the HTTP Pull CDN, the website owner stores content on their server and rewrites URLs to include a subdomain. Then, when the specific content is requested, it is pulled to the CDN network from the host and delivered to the closest point to the consumer who requested that content (the content is cached on edge server).

Streaming

There are two supported streaming types in the OnApp CDN – live streaming and on-demand streaming. To utilize a CDN streaming service, you have to deploy a CDN streaming edge server.

Live Streaming

Live Streaming CDN allows delivering the content to end users in a live broadcast mode. When using a live streaming CDN service, end users receive media at the same time as traditional broadcasting.

Video On-Demand Streaming

Video On-Demand Streaming CDN allows delivering video on request and makes it repeatedly accessed. Consumers can control content and are able to fast forward or rewind it the same as live streaming.

Only mp4 and flv files are currently supported by VoD streaming.

To utilize a CDN streaming service, you have to deploy a CDN streaming edge server.

Setting up OnApp CDN includes:

  • Enabling CDN for your cloud in the OnApp customer dashboard (contact OnApp Support if you don’t have dashboard access)
  • Running CDN Setup Wizard in your OnApp Control Panel
  • Setting up storage servers
  • Setting up edge servers
  • Adding CDN edge groups and assigning them to buckets
  • Creating CDN resources (when you create a CDN resource, CDN is enabled automatically in the OnApp)
  • Assigning users to a bucket and setting their permissions

For more information on how to set up OnApp CDN, refer to the Get Started section of this guide.

When creating a user account, you need to grant the user all necessary permissions for managing CDN resources and assign the user to the bucket.

Storage servers store web content to be distributed over the Content Delivery Network. The content is then cached by edge servers and delivered to consumers.

Edge servers cache web content and deliver it to website visitors. They are deployed to compute resources and managed the same way as virtual servers. You can use edge servers to sell CDN bandwidth to your end users, and/or submit the edge server to the OnApp CDN marketplace and sell your bandwidth to other hosting providers. You can create as many edge servers as you need and place them to different compute resources in different geographical locations, and easily broaden your CDN by combining your own edge servers with other locations on the CDN marketplace. You can also build a CDN solely with marketplace resources. For details, refer to the Edge servers chapter.

Edge groups are groups of edge servers that can be your own and/or those you subscribe to from the CDN marketplace. They are usually grouped by location, so they represent a pool of servers for a given geographical area.

Edge groups are assigned Buckets to set the prices for the bandwidth that your end users consume. You can assign several groups to one bucket at a time, and establish different geographical zones with different pricing. The bandwidth pricing of the bucket is the price for CDN bandwidth sold to your end users.

CDN resources are specific servers with content that an end user wants to distribute via CDN. CDN resources are assigned to edge groups, which determine the list of servers taking part in distributing/caching of their data.