Innovation at the edge: How Edge Storage makes content delivery really hop

The most well-known benefit of a CDN is to cache files at an edge node, bringing content closer to the user by reducing physical distance and latency.

You can always add more PoPs and faster servers but real innovation in the CDN space has been somewhat limited. Still, the bunnies figured there must be more ways to add value and squeeze better performance out of our content delivery platform, we just needed to create them. This is where we hit upon the idea of Edge Storage.

All your content assets need to be stored somewhere and if your business involves serving up lots of heavy files like videos, your first thought is probably to use one of the big cloud hosts like AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. But when it comes to replicating content globally to make it optimally accessible for your users, things can get very complicated very quickly. Cloud storage becomes a management headache.

Centralized cloud storage could be holding you up

For many of the big names in cloud storage the manually intensive process of configuration can make it difficult to ensure that every time you make changes to a file it is synced and updated across all of your PoPs. An old copy of a file or a missing file could cause serious problems or throw a 404, destroying the user experience and sending your visitors to a competitor.  

If you look at the way big vendor storage buckets work across multiple regions, you have to manually link the buckets and replicate a file across the whole chain. The process is manually intensive and if you intend to host a copy of your data across multiple geographic regions there are costs associated with each copy of that data in the cloud.

These issues generally force websites to use storage in a centralized way, creating a bottleneck in terms of slower transmission rates as well as redundancy pitfalls due to stored files being retained and accessed from a single location.

Even if you’re using a CDN, a cached file that is not accessed frequently will be deleted, so the next request will go back to centralized storage to retrieve the file. Then you're back at square one.

With the addition of Edge Storage to it's platform, bunny.net hasn't just simplified the file replication process and configuration workflow, we've optimized performance even more by integrating directly with Bunny CDN to deliver lightning-fast access to the content. We all know fast content makes happy users.

In the Bunny universe, Edge Storage is cloud storage that’s automatically replicated to the edge (hence the name!). You upload your files using FTP, the HTTP API, or our dashboard file manager and they are automatically replicated to regions of your choice and made available to your users for immediate download - no manual configuration to link regions.

Because Edge Storage is integrated directly with Bunny CDN, your users get up to 5X faster download speeds and better network latency compared to traditional cloud storage, and you save on costs thanks to the free internal traffic between the storage and CDN platforms.

In fact, it's even easier on the wallet. In keeping with the true nature of the cloud, our custom-built technology scales with your business in a pay-as-you-go fashion, and there are no file counts or size limits to worry about.

This makes it easier to migrate data in and out with no fear of vendor lock-in, and ensures that even those less frequently accessed files are still quickly accessible. Yes, even those deleted by the CDN, because Edge Storage retains a copy of the content.

Cloud storage, but better

We reckon the Edge Storage model improves upon the concept of cloud storage by avoiding bottlenecks and improving transfer speeds, and with global replication across four continents (Europe, North America, Asia, Oceania) it’s also great for redundancy. Your files are supercharged by our global load balancer and automatic datacenter failover which immediately re-routes any problematic regions to the next best destination making sure files are always available when needed.

While Edge Storage is all very exciting for us, and we hope it is for you too, we’re just getting started! As a new-generation of cloud-native applications are emerging that are far more compute-intensive and latency-sensitive, the centralized architecture of the traditional cloud cannot meet performance expectations.

We believe the edge is where the focus on innovation is right now. We recently introduced frontend application hosting on the edge and we’re going to have more to talk about over the coming months with developments like Edge Scripting. Watch this space!