Creating a 'Cloud Storage' Mashup for High Performance, Low Cost Content Delivery

Many ‘Cloud Storage’ providers have launched in the last two years, providing internet accessible data storage and delivery in several continents that is backed by rigourous Service Level Agreements (SLAs), guaranteeing specific performance and uptime targets. The facilities offered by these providers is leveraged by developers via provider-specific Web Service APIs. For content creators, these providers have emerged as a genuine alternative to dedicated Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) for global file storage and delivery, as they are significantly cheaper, have comparable performance and no ongoing contract obligations. As a result, the idea of utilising Storage Clouds as a ‘poor mans’ CDN is very enticing. However, many of these ‘Cloud Storage’ providers are merely basic storage services, and do not offer the capabilities of a fully-featured CDN such as intelligent replication, failover, load redirection and load balancing. Furthermore, they can be difficult to use for non-developers, as each service is best utilised via unique web services or programmer APIs. In this paper we describe the design, architecture, implementation and user-experience of MetaCDN, a system that integrates these ‘Cloud Storage’ providers into an unified CDN service that provides high performance, low cost, geographically distributed content storage and delivery for content creators, and is managed by an easy to use web portal.