Committed to Open Standards and Specifications

Open Caching, CDNI, and the Open Capacity Marketplace

Vecima believes in open standards and specifications that enable interoperability across the CDN ecosystem. We demonstrate that commitment through our active participation in organizations like the SVTA and the IETF. Through cooperation and interoperability, content providers and CDNs can achieve both reduced cost and increased quality.

Armed with common configuration languages, management protocols, and processes for delegating traffic and providing observability, content services are empowered to take advantage of each CDN’s unique capabilities and footprints. By utilizing the most appropriate CDN for each user, consumers benefit from improved video quality and lower latency, content providers can deliver those benefits at lower costs, and CDNs can augment their footprints by re-delegating to other networks with seamless handoff.

Open Caching, an ongoing project of the SVTA, defines the specifications that make interoperability possible:

• Configuration Management provides configuration objects, comprising a superset of CDN functions, and the protocols necessary for communication
• Routing defines protocols for delegating traffic
• Logging and Capacity Insights provide observability
• Content Management enables lifecycle control of cached objects

These specifications filter back to the CDNI working group of the IETF where they eventually reach maturity as RFCs.

Most recently, the working group published RFC 9808: Capacity Capability Advertisement Extensions. I am privileged to be an author on this RFC along with Andy Ryan, Nir Sopher, and all the other contributors who worked to bring this document to completion over the last few years. With RFC 9808, CDNs can communicate available resources and limits to upstream partners like content providers and other CDNs, allowing them to make delegation decisions.

With these common standards and specifications, new business models become possible. Vecima is proud to be a founding member of the forthcoming Open Capacity Marketplace, an open platform that connects content providers with CDN capacity from ISPs, CDNs, and broadcasters. Through the OCM, a content provider can query CDN resources across participants by a wide array of constraints, solicit bids based on those constraints, and then reserve capacity for delegation. Additionally, functionality is provided to audit traffic served and settle payment. Once reserved, configuration and delegation happen as per the Open Caching and CDNI specifications.

We are so excited about the Open Capacity Marketplace that we are hosting a presentation at our booth (Hall 1, B15) today at IBC (4:00 pm / 1600). Please join us for a demo presented by Omar Ramadan, co-founder of Blockcast, to learn more!