What Is Open Caching?
Learn more about caching at the next Content Delivery Summit.
See complete videos and other highlights from Content Delivery Summit on Streaming Media's YouTube channel.
Read the complete transcript of this video:
Jason Thibeault: The Streaming Video Alliance is really known for open caching. It's one of the first working groups that was spun up when the organization was started about five and a half years ago. So I want to go over what open caching is and how it plays in with the CDNs and relates to CDN technologies.
So, first and foremost, what is open caching? In general, it's a network of interconnected caches. These caches can communicate to each other via APIs. So that is ultimately what the open caching network is. There's a management component as well that would allow somebody to manage multiple open caching-compliant caches from a single point of management. But really, this is all about connecting the caches together so that the cachers are aware of what's happening in other caches.
Open caching network is really about APIs. So that's how this is facilitated. Unlike traditional caches within their own delivery networks, these caches are open. They're able to be connected to programmatically via APIs. And that allows these caches, again, to aggregate all that data up into that management plane.
Open caching is also about reference code, so we launched an open source initiative last year called Streaming Video Alliance Labs. Our labs initiative was meant to codify specifications developed by our working groups in the reference code. So the idea is, you don't just get documents and figure out, "How do you build this? This looks really cool, but where should I start?"
And so the idea was, we would produce this reference code for the specifications so that people could download the doc, understand the context of the API, and then grab some reference code, whether it's in Python, or JavaScript, or some other scripting language, and be able to then implement that within some sort of system.
Last, open caching is really about a collaborative approach. As you'll see in a second, we'll talk about who's involved with this initiative and who's been contributing. You'll see that it has strong input from the entire ecosystem.
Again, back who the Alliance is. It's got network operator input and service provider input and content rights holders input, and technology vendor input. So it's really a collaborative effort to bring open caching into the open. And again, the whole point of open caching is really to enable network operators specifically to have caches in their system and in their networks, which are open and available to rights holders to connect to other caches and other networks and have one big interconnected delivery pool of content.
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