No worries if Stackpath CDN is in your multi-CDN mix with Jet-Stream, you will be migrated in a single click without any downtime or migration efforts.

Are you a direct CDN customer with Stackpath or any other CDN, and are you looking for an alternative CDN for video, live streams, live radio, music or podcasts? Think smart before switching and making the same mistake by creating your own lock-in again!

StackPath CDN discontinued

StackPath CDN (formerly Highwinds CDN) has been a reliable CDN partner for years, with good performance, low rates, flexibility, and good support. However, the CDN landscape is extremely competitive, causing profitability challenges for many CDNs (see our recent blog about profitability in our industry). 

Smooth transition

We were sad to hear about StackPath’s recent decision to discontinue their CDN service per November 22 2023, but fully understand their focus shift on edge cloud computing. Thanks to Jet-Stream’s Multi-CDN design, we have a large list of alternative CDNs, so our customers will not experience any outages, or performance issues, and do not have to migrate anything. 

CDN migration is real

Chances are that you are using a CDN for your mission-critical streaming, video delivery, radio, music, or podcast service. What if it is decided to discontinue that CDN service? What if the CDN has outages, or performance issues, or is missing features that you need for your roadmap? You will have to migrate to another CDN. 

Did you create your own lock-in?

Chances are that you are deeply integrated with your current CDN, so migration can be a pain. Live ingest, origin configuration, caching tuning, anti-deep-linking, geo-fencing, log processing, and monitoring are just a few examples of integrations that you typically would need to run a proper global delivery service. All these backend API features are different per CDN. Hopefully, you are using a dynamic database to generate your URLs. If not, you are up to manually searching and replacing URLs on all your sites, portals, and apps.

Akamai, or multi CDN?

Akamai has taken over a select number of accounts from StackPath. These customers will have to migrate horizontally to Akamai since the StackPath CDN will be dismantled. Many StackPath customers deliberately chose not to work with Akamai. We can imagine that these users are now looking for alternatives. If you have to migrate anyway, why not investigate smarter options?

Will you create another lock-in?

Are you learning from your first CDN experience that creating such a lock-in is a bad idea? Or are you creating a new lock-in with another CDN? Migrating horizontally between CDNs does not get you further.

‘Boy, I wish there was a solution to prevent CDN lock-ins and dependency’

Surprise, surprise: there is 🙂 Jet-Stream has 3 decades of experience with using multiple CDNs. This expertise, by learning from many customer cases who encountered exactly the above-described lock-in and migration pains, led us to develop a more holistic, multi-CDN approach. 

Jet-Stream Airflow Multi CDN

Released in 2010, Jet-Stream’s platform was the first designed streaming platform to split the control plane and the delivery plane, raising smart controls into a software layer instead of having features embedded in edge servers and CDNs. This led to further innovations and deep integrations with many global CDNs, called Airflow, released in 2015, and has been in successful operation since then for many broadcasters, sports clubs, events, publishers and enterprises with mission-critical streaming services.

Jet-Stream Unified Multi-CDN APIs

With Jet-Stream Airflow, you have one unified back-end API to automate setting up live streams, transcoding, origins, real-time per-title CDN selection, geo-fencing, cache flushing, and deep-linking. This means that you don’t have to integrate with individual CDNs, and you can instantly switch between CDNs, without any downtime and any feature loss. One API, to rule them all :).

Multi CDN streaming caching optimisation

Jet-Stream Cloud acts as the origin shield, actively preventing your origin from being hammered by all the CDNs edges thanks to live caching intelligence. This dramatically reduces the load and scaling costs of your origin servers. Jet-Stream also offers integrated origins, tuned for streaming. Caching optimization at the CDNs is already done for both live streaming and vod, so you can skip all these complex steps. 

Unified Multi-CDN log processing

Also, Jet-Stream automatically collects streams of log data from all the CDNs, aggregates this data into one unified log stream, and optionally into real-time in-depth streaming statistics too, so you don’t need to build or buy a separate analytics service. 

Realtime multi CDN algorithm

Airflow does not rely on passive and cacheable DNS for load balancing but uses its own active load balancers and smart load balancing algorithms. Each user request is individually calculated in real-time, to be able to offer each user the most optimal CDN path. This guarantees much higher uptime compared to slow and unenforced DNS solutions. The algorithm balances proximity, quality, and costs to guarantee high performance to the audience, and the lowest costs to customers, saving up to 40% compared to other multi-CDN solutions. Win-win.

Load balancing API

You can integrate your portals, apps, players, and sites with Jet-Stream’s Multi CDN load balancers. A great example is Jet-Stream’s HTML5 player, which requests a list of recommended CDNs from the load balancing API so it can do mid-stream switching to alternative CDNs in the case of performance issues.

Multi CDN security

Geo-fencing is controlled in the Jet-Stream multi-CDN platform, so you don’t have to manage complex geo-fencing per individual CDN. The load balancer also automatically creates new tokens per CDN so you can control access to multiple CDNs via one unified token. We bet you haven’t seen this anywhere else.

A bespoke mix of CDNs

Depending on your use case, Jet-Stream creates a dynamic mix of CDNs that suit your needs. Whether you need to cover specific geographies, are looking for better performance, fallback CDNs, the best price, or specific features: Jet-Stream Airflow enables this mix. You can even add your own CDN contracts to the mix. A set of business rules helps figure out which CDNs should be used under which circumstances, and the API lets you fully control distribution with your own logic and metrics.

Reliable, future-proof

You may think: hey but when I’m integrating with Jet-Stream, I’m creating another lock-in! Ha, yes, that could be right. But what are your options? We have seen attempts to build homebrew multi-CDN solutions, and many of them failed. We have seen Multi-CDN solution vendors come and go, remember Cedexis? And we have seen attempts to introduce multi-CDN services come and fail, remember EBU? Jet-Stream has been active in streaming since 1994. We are a profitable, long-term partner, here to help. We remain in business because we are of strategic value to our customers, not a lock-in.

Learn more about Airflow Multi CDN

One more thing: 

There’s more than just Multi CDN. Jet-Stream also takes away a lot of pain in streaming workflow processes, such as encoding, transcoding, security, playback, and analytics. Airflow Multi CDN is integrated into a suite of professional streaming tools that give you full customization control, ease of use, and extreme cost reduction. So if you are looking for StackPath alternatives, check it out, create a test environment including a live consult

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