Content Delivery and Management

Abstract

The Web has evolved in the last decade from a mean to distribute content with marginal interest to a major communication media, where critical content and services are delivered to the users. This success was mainly driven by the concerns of content providers about the user-perceived performance of content delivery. When high availability, scalability, and performance are required, a common solution for content providers is to exploit third-party services to improve the performance of content and service delivery. The technical goal of Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers is to guarantee adequate delivery performance even when the incoming request load is overwhelming for the content provider alone. CDNs have been originally proposed to primarily distribute static Web content and some limited streaming audio/video content over the Internet. First-generation CDNs were designed primarily to ease network congestion caused by the delivery of static Web pages through congested public peering points. However, the current context for content delivery is very different from that of the inception of these infrastructures, which date back to almost 10 years ago. Indeed, the Web scenario is currently characterized by an increased sophistication and complexity in delivered content. Modern Web contents are often dynamically generated and personalized according to the user preferences and needs. Traditional content delivery technologies designed for static content are not able to meet the new needs, as there are inherent challenges and limitations in the delivery of dynamic content that need to be overcome. In the last years, CDN started to evolve towards the support for the