CDN

Requirements

CDN: Mandatory requirements

Must provide “origin pull” support.
- Questions: Do you allow us to override the Expires headers being sent by the origin? Will you obey long Expires headers (5 years) and cache content accordingly? Once a piece of content has been cached on your network, under what conditions would your CDN re-request that content from the origin? Do you allow full and partial (based on regexes) cache flushes?
Must be able to receive all requests to www.victoria.ac.nz and forwarded (based on a url path) to the location of the intended application/service.
1. Must allow us (via a console) to rename any of the resources individually, without changes to all at once.
2. Must allow us (via a console) to add a new resource, without a change request.
Response times must be consistent and fast. This means fast for users in NZ, especially Wellington, as this is where most of our users are. However, the range between the fastest and slowest CDN is less than the gain we would get going to the slowest.
1. Additionally, the response times must be consistent and fast for users in our main markets (E.g China, USA, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia).
2. Additionally, the response times must be fast if the closest POP is unavailable. Test the next closest POP.
- - Question: Do they support HTTP2 and HTTPS? Do they use GZIP for static text-based content. How many nodes to you have? Do they use Anycast?
Must have 99.99% up-time
Must offer APIs so we can perform some functions from tools/other applications. Most importantly, to revalidate the cache and a 'purge on save' from the CMS, but also others. Probably need to discover what each offers and provide a relative score.
Must be strong financially. The implementation will take a lot of work, and some more if we had to switch to another provider with no lead time. How long would a switch take us?
Must be trusted with our 'front door' (i.e. technically secure). Is the DIA sheet really any help to us or just a compliance cost?

CDN: Other considerations

Value for money: While we may not want the cheapest, but neither do we want to pay a premium for the brand.
1. Setup fees: What, if any, are they?
2. Traffic accounting: Is traffic between the edge POPs and the customer origin counted as traffic against our total?
- Questions: Can you demonstrate that you’re better than one of the “value” CDNs?
Contract terms: How log are we locked in for? How does the price change with contract term?
User interface: Relative quality of dashboard/reporting interface. Can we modify/extend/add to this?

Other: Mandatory requirements, but not necessarily from the CDN service/provider

Must offer object storage for various static resources (e.g. Angular app, photos, etc)
1. Must have API to hook up to triggers in Squiz, etc
- Question: Are users in China able to view video served from your storage?

Test URLs

The following URLs will be used for testing, including the bench marking, for the CDN trial and the 'Squiz-to-the-cloud' PoC when it runs. As such, they contain a mixture of content sources, origns, services and complexity. Feel free to add more

For bench mark data, we will ideally have bench mark data from different locations (NZ, Australia, China and USA) for a week or more before making any changes. See the reporting from https://www.webpagetest.org/ as an example of the detailed reporting and what we can learn from it.

PG programme with international switcher enabled: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/explore/postgraduate-programmes/master-of-science-by-coursework-and-thesis/about?international=true
Events on home site: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/events
GSA search: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/search?q=Accounting
Victoria's static files: https://static.victoria.ac.nz/examples/granular-content.html
CourseFinder: http://www.victoria.ac.nz/study/programmes-courses/courses/by-subject?sub=79
Intranet: https://www.victoria.ac.nz/staff/human-resources/pay/salary-ranges