CDN Scaling Challenges
summary
Fastly runs CDN POPs on commodity racks (32 machines, 768 GB RAM, ~24 TB SSD per POP) and hits ~700k RPS across two racks by pushing routing and load‑balancing into servers: 2.5 million BGP routes per server, ECMP from switches, and no load balancers. Varnish handles request logic and a kernel/mark-based API chooses upstreams; ARP/MAC sharding and fake MACs enable graceful failover and connection preservation, and the design proves resilient despite observed transient packet‑loss spikes (~3.1%). distributed routing Varnish
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Start
- 2:33Artur Birdman
- 10:20Criteria for Jan 5 Design
- 23:14What Happens When You Reset All the Tcp Connections
- 24:42Graceful Failover
- 25:26Distributed Load Balancer
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