Dynamic Content is something that is commonly misunderstood. We all know that dynamic content is being used more and more by many of the communication monoliths on the Internet, such as Facebook and YouTube. However, there are many forms of dynamic content that can make or break a business. Below is a fascinating graph that illustrates the rise to power of dynamic content during the last four years. As you can see, the old guard of Yahoo and MSN are being replaced by the dynamic communication platforms of Facebook and YouTube. All of this is a far cry from what the Internet was invented as back in 1969… a research tool, and an experimental one at that.
Credit: Mashable.com
So what are the implications of this new type of dynamic content for business? Well, we touched on this briefly in a previous post comparing CDNs with Cloud Acceleration. I am going to take this a step further from that post and say that traditional CDNs can actually restrict a business’s ability to deliver the operational and diverse content that is required by end users- unless they incorporate a full complement of Internet correcting technologies. The proliferation of dynamic content does not bode well for utilizing content delivery networks that exclusively rely on caching content in order to offer improved performance.
There are several types of content and applications that cannot be cached. These can be great assets if utilized to their potential, but those companies that cannot keep up with these new methods of communication will be quickly outpaced, regardless of industry. Today, the dominant dynamic traffic traversing the Internet includes online gaming, like the multi-user games seen on Facebook, VoIP and video conferencing in the form of Skype and others, as well as desktop virtualization protocols and file transfer protocols like FTP or CIFS. It is clear from the graph above that the internet is not being used in the same way that it once was. Caching has worked very well in the past, but it is time to leverage new technologies for optimal delivery of these dynamic protocols.
So instead of using a bandaid solution such as a CDN, which essentially attempts to avoid the Internet as much as possible, consider Cloud Acceleration, which fixes Internet problems with optimized Internet routing, TCP and UDP optimization, data multiplexing, byte-level data deduplication and a plethora of other techniques. Cloud Acceleration provides the opportunity for a paradigm shift in efficient content delivery… how are you incorporating these technologies into your business?
Jonathan Hoppe
