Per-Entity Metadata Working Group

[Nick Roy <>]

Very cool.  How much work was it to set this up, and how many people do you have prepared to support this?  Which service tier are you using (looks like Azure Edge has three service tiers, I'm guessing the "S2" Akamai version would get us what we need)[1]?  Since the UK Federation is similar in size and uses a lot of the same infrastructure components as InCommon, your answers will probably help InCommon understand how much work this would be and how we should be considering resourcing it.

Everyone on this list should note that the SLA associated with this service (at all levels of the service) is defined in [2] as "at least 99.9% [uptime]..."  That is two nines short of what this group has been bouncing around.  So - how does that sit with you all?  Rhys, do you have any concerns with this?

For those interested, US pricing for the Azure CDN is documented here [2].  Their pricing appears based on egress, so I don't know how our NET+ pricing would interact with this.  I'll reach out to Sean O'Brien to try to find out.

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cdn-create-new-endpoint/

[2] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cdn/

Thanks,

Nick

On Aug 10, 2016, at 1:40 PM, Rhys Smith <> wrote:

By the way, if anyone wants to try a CDN version of the UK fed distribution service (not particularly exciting, I must admit), I already have one set up using the Azure CDN. I haven’t yet got our tooling to send a purge command to manually refresh the CDN on publication of a new set of aggregates; it’s easy to do, I just haven’t had time yet. Will be doing that soon then having a more thorough play with it.

http://ukf-md-cdn.azureedge.net

Rhys.
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On 10 Aug 2016, at 19:22, Nick Roy <> wrote:

On Aug 10, 2016, at 12:12 PM, Cantor, Scott <> wrote:

I think there would have to be some real benefit (not just experience
gained) before we would consider doing that. From where I sit, the
current distribution method Just Works (TM) so I have to turn around
and ask InCommon deployers: Is there something about the current
distribution method that is suboptimal or not working for you (apart
from the size of the aggregate of course)?

I don't think the point was to help us (and nobody is suggesting the URL would change), so if Ops doesn't think incorporating a cloud/CDN delivery strategy under cover of a name controlled by InCommon is a useful step for its own MDQ direction-setting, I don't think any of us would motivate it.

Well, I just found out from Tom last week that TSG is planning an upgrade to the Ann Arbor network, in part motivated by the "storm" of network traffic that our metadata updates cause when clients fetch a new aggregate each business day.  In that regard, trying out a CDN would probably help alleviate our demand on at least that one network.  It would also gain us operational experience working with a CDN service.  If I had my 'drothers, I would have two new ops staff already hired who would be part of this and gain operational knowledge from it.  I don't think that will happen until later this year or next, so if IJ and others in TSG think they might be able to get some useful experience out of this, and that it would help with the network issue or in other ways, I'd be in support.

Nick

-- Scott