What is Traffic Director? How it is implemented to our CDN infrastructure?
A one size fits all CDN strategy will not be a fit for an online business that scales content to the global audience. Managing content delivery costs would also be a worry. 5centsCDN comes with traffic management solution powered by NS1 and Dyn, that builds the seamless multi-CDN infrastructure while controlling the cost and performance of your CDN.
Traffic Director is the most advanced feature added to our CDN. Traffic Director enables you to route your CDN traffic to the preferred MultiCDN PoP. We have partnered with four of the best CDNâs, Â LimeLight, CDNetworks, StackPath & HighWinds whose delivery capability or PoPâs are different in the various regions. The best performance CDN nodes will be automatically detected, and your CDN traffic will be routed there safely and securely.
Traffic director from 5centsCDN works intelligently and can able to monitor the packet loss and latency correctly if any occurs.
Users watching the content from different devices
Traffic Director routes the traffic to the best performance CDN nodes
If one CDN PoP has any issue, the traffic will be routed to the next best performance CDN nodes which are close to the userâs location
Traffic Director rule sets can be enabled via our control panel. If you switch to our enterprise plan, Traffic Director feature will be available to you right on your dashboard.
You can start by setting the global delivery, ASN filter, and country filter. From there you can improve to a more advanced traffic management solution considering the business logic and real-time performance telemetry.
Implementation and further use of Traffic Director
To implement and to use the Traffic Director, follow the below steps:
1. Log into your 5centsCDN console.
2. On your client area, click on the Manage CDN which will lead you to your Dashboard.
3. On the left side tab, click on the drop-down menu Rules which is under Traffic Director and then click on Rule Set.
4. It will list your Default Rule Set via which you deliver the traffic.Click on the same.
5. This will take you to the detailed view of the Traffic Director.
The above steps are demonstrated in the below illustration.
Initially, you have to set your Global Delivery to your desired CDN by toggling the button to Enable mode, for, e.g., letâs say if you need StackPath for your global delivery, all you have to do is to switch the âDisableâ button to âEnable.' This will ultimately route your traffic to StackPath, and your global delivery will be done through it.
Once you have enabled your Global Delivery, you can check your status of your rule set and its CDN by doing a quick ping check with your rule set, and you will get the response from your allocated CDN. For example, if your Default Rule Set is trafficdirector.5centscdn.net and if you have assigned CDNetworks for your delivery, you can check your ruleset as illustrated in the below figure and make sure you have pointed to the right CDN.
If in case there occurs a degraded performance for your global delivery CDN, then ASN Filter and Country Filter comes in handy. For, e.g., if in case there happens a degradation for a particular ASN, then you can switch that specific ASN traffic to another CDN with ASN Filter.You can do the same for a location as well using the Country Filter tab. This will give rise to two scenarios which are explained below.
Scenario 1: Degraded performance in ASN
Let's say you have set your global delivery to StackPath, and if you feel that there is a degraded performance to a couple of IPâs, then you can switch the traffic for those IPâs with a different available CDN ( Limelight or CDNetwork ) Â by adding the corresponding ASN to it.
To implement this, click on the ASN Filter and add your ASN to the required, available CDN and toggle the button to âEnable.' Once you have made changes, please make sure to check your delivery from those IPs by taking a ping result to your rule set and confirm the changes you have done has been propagated.
Scenario 2: Degraded performance in a Country
This is similar to the first scenario, where you have a degraded performance for certain countries with your Global Delivery CDN.
Here, you can always switch your traffic to the desired CDN for the countries where you are facing the outages. To implement this, click on the Country Filter and add your ASN to the required, available CDN and toggle the button to âEnable.' Once you have made changes, you can verify the delivery by making a quick ping test from these countries and confirm the changes has been taken into effect.
For more information on Traffic Director, contact our sales team at [email protected].