CrowdCache Overview
You have your own network. You have your own servers. You have your own infrastructure. Why don’t you have your own CDN?
Deploying CDN services with CrowdCache is fundamentally simple. We have taken the shroud off of the traditional CDN and put the power of CDN technology into your hands.
Leveraging a new software design model, we bridge the gap between software-as-a-service and traditional shrink-wrapped software. We’re both a service and a software company. We provide powerful software, CrowdCache, that works in conjunction with our cloud-based routing, QoS, and load-balancing product CrowdDirector.
CrowdCache represents years of man-hours designing a flexible and precise system to provide our customers with a service that they control themselves which far extends the capabilities of a CDN.
“We’ve been fanatical about how the product functions because we care passionately about the growth of the Internet. CrowdCache is focused around simple design with amazing control.”
Capabilities
In a nutshell, CrowdCache is a cache engine that comes in the form of a lightweight Java binary. It fully integrates with our already released CrowdDirector, a global load-balancing service platform.
Through this seamless integration, CrowdCache users harness the power of globally-distributed, very large caching clusters and apply the business and technical logic of their choice to how their content is being delivered.
Enter the Crowd in 3Crowd. Think of your globally distributed cache engine as a Crowd of expendable resources that you manage through a simple yet powerful web interface.
Beyond this extreme flexibility and control is a very rich set of analytics that are automatically rolled out and made available instantly when a new CrowdCache joins the crowd.
Additionally, individual CrowdCache nodes can be organized into pools, which then become available as a single network resource to apply routing logic. Within a pool of CrowdCache nodes, you can also define load-balancing behavior, offering an extra level of granularity.
Benefits
- Build your own CDN using your own hardware, or cloud instances, or any mix of both.
- Literally set up a CDN in minutes.
- Scale up and down at will, instantly. Deploy virtual machines running CrowdCache to accommodate traffic surges.
- Reduce time-to-market and offer CDN services to your customers in no time.
- Trim down the engineering and operation overhead bound to managing a large-scale network.
- Offer differentiated caching services based on CrowdCache nodes running on different breeds of servers or cloud instances.
- Use powerful analytics to fine-tune the usage and sizing of your infrastructure and to bill your own customers.
- Remove the operational complexity of constant software upgrades to run your content delivery platform. Benefit from seamless and regular upgrades of CrowdCache software and offload software version testing to 3Crowd.
Software specs |
Description |
| Hardware Agnostic | Works virtually on any hardware that runs JAVA 1.6 |
| OS Agnostic | Has been tested on: Linux, UNIX FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris, Windows |
| Reduced System Footprint | Binary weight <3MB |
| Sealed JAR File | Hermetically self contained |
Node grouping |
|
| Group your nodes into logical pools | |
| Pools act as a single network resource | |
| Auto load-balancing between group member nodes |
|
| Self healing pools |
|
| Auto-assign node to intelligent geo-pools based on node IP address | |
| Auto-assign to predefined pool | |
| Pool create/delete/rename | |
Seamless CrowdDirector integration |
|
| CrowdCache web pool management | |
| CrowdDirector load-balancing rules include CrowdCache pools as a routing resource | |
| New nodes are automatically added to your existing CrowdDirector CrowdCache resources | |
CLI interface |
|
| Installable on-server CLI debug utility |
|
| Installable on-server GUI utility | Same as above but through GUI |
Node configuration |
|
| Dual config options |
|
| Configurable low resource conditions |
|
| Configurable service ports | http, stats, backplane |
Configurable caching behaviour |
|
| Per mapping cache bypass config per file extension | Allows to not cache explicit file extensions |
| Configurable per node cache-size | |
| Configurable cache-miss behavior |
|
| Dashboard triggered cache-flush | CrowdDirector dashboard triggering of cache-flush |
Node security |
Registration keys | Generate unique keys in the dashboard to uniquely identify your nodes |
| Instant registration revoke | |
| Node segregation by keys | Use one key per group of node admins and revoke it anytime for all nodes using that key |
Misc delivery capabilities |
|
| Rate shaping | Configurable through node CLI |
| Secured tokens per folder | Configurable short-lived URLs and tokens |
| Video URL parameter seeking | Currently FLV byte ranges |
| HTTP/1.1 206 byteranges |
|
Analytics |
|
| CrowdDirector dashboard integration | Display of CrowdCache servers analytics through the CrowdDirector web dashboard |
| Extensive analytics |
|
| Batch-processable exports | Every graph can be exported as a CSV dataset from the CrowdDirector dashboard |
| Rawlogs | Augmented Apache/w3c rawlogs available for download |
Pricing
