Apple CDN is live with 10x capacity
The Apple CDN has been a poorly kept secret, and rumours have been circulating for months that they will be dropping their accounts with Akamai and Level 3 in favour of their own in house content delivery network. It is now being reported that the Apple CDN is live and running in North America and Europe, two of Apple’s biggest markets. The reason for implementing their new CDN is to help give them greater control over the way they deliver content to their end users whilst improving downloads speeds for their many iCloud and iTunes customers around the world.
Whilst it looks like they have started using the network to push files to their customers, it looks as if the Apple CDN is only delivering a small amount of their data at the moment. This is restricted to downloads of their operating system, OS X, and thanks to interconnect details with many ISPs, including Comcast, the Apple CDN download capacity has increased by 10 times over their normal levels.
Apple CDN Poised to Deliver All Data
Whilst the numbers of and speed of downloads of Apple’s OS X show that the Apple CDN is coming along well, it has been reported that Apple are continuing to use Akamai and Level 3 CDN networks for their other services, including iTunes, iTunes Radio and App Store downloads. Although it is anticipated that this will change in the near future with all downloads transferred to the Apple CDN.
According to Streamingmedia, a news company with expertise in the streaming media industry, Apple has invested a lot in the Apple CDN and has thus achieved a relatively fast roll out time. They note that “it’s too early to know how much traffic will come over and when, but Apple’s already started using their own CDN much faster than I expected. The pace of their build out and amount of money they are spending on infrastructure is incredible. Based on [Streamingmedia’s] calculations, Apple has already put in place multiple terabits per second of capacity and by the end of this year, will have invested well more than $100M in their CDN build out