Edward Tsinovoi - The Next Wave of Internet Infrastructure

Edward, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. We're very glad to have you with us today. Do you want to add anything before we dive into the questions? 

Edward Tsinovoi: Hello Tim. Thank you very much for having me today. I think I'm ready to start and go over with you on your topics and questions. And I will be glad to provide as much as more information.

Tim Butara: Okay, perfect. Then let's start with some basics to kind of, to kind of ground the conversation. So I said that we were going to talk about content delivery networks and the transformation. So how are CDNs transforming and why is this transformation important for the concept of the open web? 

Edward Tsinovoi: Let me refer to two interesting transitions. You know, the Internet world has experienced several revolutions in the past 20 30 years. At the end of 90s, CDN providers arrived and spread thousands of servers worldwide to deliver the digital content to the end users. While in the past, most of the digital content was static, today it became much more dynamic, much more personalized.

With the revolution of generative AI, you know Tim, it's, it's amazing how easy it's became to to create a new content. We're actually facing a tsunami of digital content that needs to be delivered to the world. However, the industry that delivers digital content is still rooted in the mindsets of 90s, including the concept All global traffic must pass through a single CDN provider.

In recent years, this concept is slowly collapses and for sure could not meet, you know, the challenges that's standing in front of us. And therefore more and more companies are looking to leverage multiple content delivery networks for delivery of their content. Parallel to the industry shift. From single CDN provider to multi CDN strategy, the CDN providers themselves made also a shift from content delivery networks to edge compute platforms.

In the past, these CDN providers behaved as a black box, which provided caching and content delivery acceleration. Today, much more happens on the edge. It starts from traffic control, such as the load balancing, A rich security services like WAF, web application firewall, bot detection, DDoS protection, and more.

Recently, in the last few years, CDN providers introduced edge computing to the edge. So today customers can really go and code their logic on the edge and not on the data centers as close as possible to the end user, and it's going, you know, side by side with the fact that we have much more dynamic traffic in the world in order to provide edge computing.

A good user experience for dynamic traffic, you must generate the content much closer to the end users. I think this is the main two transitions that this market is passing in the last few years. 

Tim Butara: That's a very interesting point, Edward, because we've often discussed you know, the, the abundance of available content that's possible with generative AI here on this podcast.

And I'm sure, you know, on, on numerous other podcasts, tech publications and stuff, but we rarely discuss the infrastructure that actually makes it possible to deliver all this content. So really on point conversation. We're really glad to have you here to discuss this with us, Edward. 

Edward Tsinovoi: Sure. So, and the thing about the infrastructure is starting from servers which create the content like NVIDIA. But after creating a content, you should now deliver this content to the end users. The delivery is on the edge platforms, on the CDN, on the CDN industry. And it's a tough challenge. 

Tim Butara: So, would you say that content delivery networks are kind of a backbone of the internet? 

Edward Tsinovoi: Tim, you're right. It is, you know, without the CDNs, the internet world was looked so different. First of all, you know, the physical networks, the pipes of the internet could not deal with the amount of traffic. Which we as a society is consuming today, much before the generative AI. So practically without the CDNs, we couldn't consume the digital content that we are consuming today. And I don't know if you remember the nineties, the experience of browsing to the websites and things like that, but it was very slow.

Initially, you got the blank page. After that, the page started to load slowly with other components. Today, who is willing to wait more than a second for a content? You know, practically no one. You expect to get all the content immediately in your browser, in your device. No matter where you are, you know, you are in US, you are at home, you are, you are abroad.

You're expect to get the content exactly in the same way. CDNs are actually making this magic and bringing this content to you and allow us as a society to leverage so much data, to consume so much data in so efficient and instant way. 

Tim Butara: So maybe you mentioned before something about using multiple CDNs and I'm guessing like we, we, we wanted to also discuss this concept called multi CDN as a service, can you break this down for us, what it means? 

Edward Tsinovoi: Sure, so Multi CDN is actually the nickname for online services strategy, which leverages multiple content delivery networks in the delivery of the, of the customer's content to the end users. Why do online services actually adopt this strategy? It starts with outages, downtimes, global ones that we all read about them in the news, but also from local ones that occur on a daily basis.

Each time in a different place for companies this outages causes to damage of hundred thousand of dollars per year for giants you know leaders e commerce leaders online gaming leaders Every minute of downtime costs hundred thousand of dollars in terms of performance, you know, industries which are sensitive to the end user performance, such online gaming, e commerce, competitive performance could not be achieved by relying on single vendor because in any given location, any given time for any given traffic type, another vendor will provide better performance.

And finally, you know, financially today, no companies are very sensitive to the cost. The edge cost is significant. You cannot. Reduce this cost while you are locked in in one vendor without a way out. In spite of that, or the transition, you know, and the work in multiple edge platforms, architecture is complicated, expensive, and causes the focus to the companies.

Multi CDN as a service platform actually makes this adoption easy. This is the goal of this, of this kind of solutions. They provide a smart traffic balancing between providers in order to optimize resiliency, performance, and cost parallel to unified management to manage, monitor, configure all the providers in a transparent way.

With consistent and optimal add on services, you know, application services like security services, traffic control services, which are working optimally even when the traffic is splitted between multiple vendors. Today, IO River, my company, provides probably the most complete solution for multi CDN as a service, which allows customers easily adopt this strategy in order to improve resiliency, improve performance in parallel to significant cost reduction.

Tim Butara: It does sound, sound like it's almost necessary in a world with so much content and so many different channels where this content wants to be on and so many different tastes and habits of the viewing and consuming the content is just inevitable. 

Edward Tsinovoi: You are right, Tim. You know, it's the world is, is developed so fast before generative AI, before the COVID we had increase of 30 percent year over year of traffic global wide.

In COVID we saw increase of Almost 100 percent year over year with the generative AI, you know, it's amazing what will happen. And we need the, we need to have the industry ready to deliver this content. Otherwise we all will create a lot of content, but it will be very difficult to deliver it to our audiences.

Tim Butara: Yeah, that was a great point. The next thing that I wanted to talk about are Hyper Cloud vendors. And I want to start with just a, a brief breakdown of, of what Hyper Cloud vendors even are. 

Edward Tsinovoi: So, so Hyper Cloud vendors. This is the, the classic, the traditional cloud vendors like AWS, you know, GCP and Azure, and we have Oracle Cloud and, and other vendors which are providing, you know, the, the full stack of data centers capabilities and allow to offload the management of data centers from on prem to a, to a cloud. These hyper clouds also, you know, provided a CDN capabilities. They develop their own CDNs based on their infrastructure and definitely it impacts this you know, this build in CDNs inside the cloud, the, the largest cloud providers impact significantly on the CDN market.

And then the question is, okay, so why we should continue, or whether we should continue to use standalone providers or use only hyper cloud providers. And, and the answer is. It's actually complicated. If your data center is a cloud based, you definitely should consider to use, at least for part of the traffic, the CDN, which coming with the, with the hyper cloud. There are advantages for that. 

But these CDNs are limited. They are limited from distribution perspective. They rely on great network, but their distribution is limited. The capabilities, the functionality that they provides is limited. And therefore, you know, if your data center is still on prem, you probably should go to the, to the standalone CDN providers.

If your data centers is already on the cloud, you should consider to use at least for part of the traffic, the CDN, which coming with the cloud, but it will not fit all your needs. And therefore you will need to combine those with a standalone CDN. And this is the really right solution for, for majority of the, of these customers, they should combine both CDNs and leverage the benefits of each one of them, there are benefits in the CDN, which is very well integrated with the cloud provider. And there are huge benefits with the standalone CDN. By combining both of them, you are building the real solution that you need in order to serve your traffic in the most efficient and effective way.

Tim Butara: What about the multi CDN as a service platform that we talked about before, would that allow you to kind of, to, to perfectly balance these two? So a hyper cloud provider CDN with your standalone CDNs, like from, from one place, would that make it easier to manage and everything? 

Edward Tsinovoi: Definitely. It's, it's definitely one of the use cases. If you want to, you're running on the cloud, you want to use both type of, of providers to manage both of them become a challenge. Route traffic to them in the right way become a challenge to manage the adult services on top of them become a challenge. IO river is definitely the right answer for that. It will allow you easily to manage this, this multiple vendors for you.

And you will feel that you are working with practically with one system under premise, the traffic will be balanced between. Hypercloud CDN and the standalone CDN provide you maximum capabilities, maximum performance, maximum reliability in the lower possible cost for you. So you are, you're actually can achieve significant cost reduction without zero compromising on capabilities, performance, resiliency. You will just improve them in a parallel to the cost reduction that you will achieve with that. 

Tim Butara: Yeah, that does sound really great. Now, in this last part of the conversation, Edward, I want to maybe take a broader look at kind of the bigger picture. And I'm wondering what are some of the key challenges and innovations within the field of edge computing that our listeners should keep top of mind if they want to venture into this space.

Edward Tsinovoi: So actually edge computing, you know, is definitely the, the content providers that made a transition from CDNs to edge computing, they are heavily invest in the edge compute world. It's evolved very, very quickly. 

And the, the edge computing platforms are challenging the cloud, the, the, you know, the traditional cloud providers like AWS, GCP, Azure, they are building more and more capabilities on the edge and by that allow to more and more use cases to be implemented on the edge. And it's provide a huge benefit because any use case that you can implement on the edge, the end user experience will be much better because it will happen much closer to you. It, it will not happen, you know, hundreds of thousands of miles from you.

It will happen very, very close to your location. And by that experience will be significant better for you. In my opinion, we're just at the beginning of this trend. We will see more and more use cases moving to there. We'll see the edge develop more and more to serve more complicated use cases compared to what we see today.

Tim Butara: So do you have any specific predictions or expectations as to what we can expect in the next few years, both in terms of content delivery networks and just edge computing? Yeah. So how do you expect this to continue? 

Edward Tsinovoi: Based on my expectations, we will see a more and more functionality become available on the edge. So you will be able to, you know, it started from just to write the code without access to any storage, without access to anything today, the edge platforms, adding storage capabilities, they're adding database capabilities, they are adding more and more capabilities to the edge. So we will definitely see more and more use cases moving to the edge.

We see the giants, you know, the leaders of this industry are ready. Leveraging the edge, they cannot do it. They cannot implement, you know, the new things that they really want to implement without moving part, not everything, part of the capabilities to the edge will continue to see it. And, and, and, and developing very quickly in parallel to that.

Customers are not willing, you know, to rely on a single vendor anymore. They, it doesn't make sense. You cannot build your entire business on, on one single point of failure. It's, it's impossible in the, in the, in the world of today. And therefore we will see more and more customers or. Implementing the multi edge strategy, whether they will implement it by themselves, whether they will go to partners, leverage technologies, technologies, which allow them to implement it like IO River.

And we already see significant adoption of multi CDN strategy in more and more verticals. And I believe we will see it rapidly grow, especially with the growth in the amount of traffic the generative AI will bring to our world. 

Tim Butara: Yeah. And also the, as the concept of the open web becomes more and more popular and dominant, this will also be super important for that.

Edward Tsinovoi: Definitely. It's like you said, it's, it's the infrastructure, which make it possible, which make the generative AI, which make the content arrived To the end users, to the audience of the content. 

Tim Butara: That was a perfect way to finish off the conversation, Edward. Thank you again for joining us. Just before we wrap it up, if listeners would like to maybe connect with you or learn more about IO River, where can they do that?

Edward Tsinovoi: First of all, in our website, ioriver.io. You will find a lot of information. You will be able also to, to create your account on our system and start your journey by yourself with the multi CDN strategy, you will find out how easy it will be for you to, to make the transition from being locked in in one provider to leverage multiple providers in so easy way that you will see the performance improvement, you will see resiliency improvement, you will see significant cost reduction, which is so important in these days. So I welcome everybody to go and enter to iorever.io website and start their journey with Multi CDN.

Tim Butara: That's great, Edward. I hope our listeners take you up on your offer and thank you again. This has been fantastic. 

Edward Tsinovoi: Thank you very much, Tim. It was a pleasure for me. 

Tim Butara: Likewise, and to our listeners, that's all for this episode. Have a great day, everyone, and stay safe. 

Outro:
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