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I'm currently running an application that delivers streaming video. All of the video content is hosted on our server, but we'd like to take some of the bandwidth load off of our server and speed up delivery to users.

Is it possible to setup a CDN (cloudfront specifically) to cache our video content to help speed up delivery/reduce bandwidth usage? Is it worth it?

We can't really move the content to S3, since we're talking about thousands of videos, here. What's the best option given our situation?

Thanks in advance!

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1 Answers1

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  1. Yes - it will speed up delivery since it's cached locally to the user requesting it.
  2. It won't reduce your total bandwidth usage (ceteris paribus) since the users are still requesting the content, but it will reduce your servers bandwidth usage since the videos will be taken and cached on the CDN endpoints.
  3. We cannot tell you if it's worth it, you need to plot your expected costs vs. rewards.

Your best option is finding a CDN host that you only pay for bandwidth costs, not hosting costs (but since shopping is off-topic for SF, I won't recommend one). Generally the drawback of these services are they they will only cache your content for a short period of time (e.g. 1 day) - so if it's not frequently accessed, it will not be as effective as being stored on these endpoints permanently.

Jay
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