Background information
The online education market is constantly expanding, which brings a variety of challenges, including large traffic volume, users that are distributed across geographic areas, and latency requirements for live classes. To provide high-quality online education services, enterprises must be able to deliver content reliably, providing smooth livestream and playback experience, with low latency to allow for interactive classes. APIs, data uploads and downloads, and self-developed signaling control are critical to enhancing the user experience of online education.
With more than 3,200 nodes worldwide, Alibaba Cloud Dynamic Route for CDN (DCDN) integrates the acceleration technology for both static and dynamic content to handle issues such as high concurrency and high bandwidth pressure on origin servers. DCDN accelerates content delivery for online education applications to deliver smooth, low latency content streaming.
Architecture
Alibaba Cloud DCDN aims to help online education enterprises build a continuous, stable, and smooth network environment for API calls, knowledge communities, online examinations, and signaling control. You can access DCDN without modifying the business logic.
Scenarios
- Requirements: Unlike static content that can be cached on edge nodes, dynamic API requests such as logons, interactive questions, and screen sharing in online courses must be redirected to the origin server. This poses high requirements on the performance and stability of network transmission links.
- Benefits: Alibaba Cloud DCDN improves transmission and interaction efficiency by providing the intelligent routing technology that selects the optimal back-to-origin route for dynamic requests.
- Requirements: In scenarios such as online examinations and competency assessments, users need to upload content such as images, audios, and videos to the origin servers. In these scenarios, upload speed is crucial to delivering a good user experience.
- Benefits: Alibaba Cloud DCDN leverages distributed nodes around the world to accelerate content delivery. Content is delivered to your customers from the closest DCDN node. The intelligent routing technology evaluates network jitter and congestion to select the optimal route for content transmission. This helps ensure that livestream content is delivered as close to real-time as possible.
- Requirements: A large amount of signaling is used in online education scenarios to ensure efficient interaction between teachers and students. However, most of the signaling is transmitted over non-standard HTTP and HTTPS protocols, which inherently have high latency and are hard to accelerate.
- Benefits: Alibaba Cloud DCDN adopts IP Application Accelerator (IPA) based on the underlying TCP and UDP transmission protocols to accelerate signal transmission across the country and reduce the service access latency.
- Requirements: As the demand for online education grows, user traffic also increases. To ensure user experience levels, it is important to ensure that the services provided are highly available. The real-time monitoring of origin servers and the load balancing mechanism are critical to handling large and sudden traffic spikes.
- Benefits: Alibaba Cloud DCDN helps you build a highly available network architecture by distributing back-to-origin requests among origin servers and providing elastic scale-out capability and real-time monitoring.
- Requirements: Online education generally entails a large number of logon requests, static instructional materials, and classes delivered over live streaming. These applications all require fast access speeds. Internet stuttering and drop-offs caused by sudden traffic surges and network congestion severely affect the teaching experience.
- Benefits: Alibaba Cloud DCDN leverages over 3,200 nodes distributed around the world to provide high quality and highly available network services for online education. DCDN accelerates content delivery, reducing bandwidth pressure on origin servers, and speeding up responses from websites and apps.
Customer benefits
- User experience
An optimal network experience can help increase customer retention.
- Service availability
The elastic scale-out architecture, load balancing mechanism, and real-time monitoring of origin servers help build a highly available network architecture.
- Easy access
You can quickly access Alibaba Cloud DCDN by using simple interface configurations without modifying your business logic.
- Cost-effectiveness
You can shift the computing and bandwidth resources from the origin server to the edge nodes to reduce costs.
Quick start
You can access DCDN by following the procedure.
Scenario | Description | References |
Quick access to DCDN | Quickly activate DCDN to accelerate content delivery. | |
Dynamic and static content delivery | Intelligently identify static and dynamic content. Static content such as images, JavaScript Style Sheets (JSS) files, and CSS files is cached on DCDN POPs. Users can directly retrieve the cached static content from the nearest DCDN POPs. Requests for dynamic content, such as POST requests, are redirected to the origin server over an optimal route selected based on intelligent routing. | |
IP Application Accelerator | Provide services to non-standard HTTP protocol users, especially those using Layer 4 proprietary protocols. IP Application Accelerator (IPA) accelerates network transmission, reduces access latency, and improves service availability. | |
Security protection | Web Application Firewall (WAF) protects web servers against vulnerabilities, such as domain hijacking, website vulnerabilities, and data leaks. Bot traffic management protects your business from malicious traffic or crawlers. | |
More acceleration regions | Global and Global (Excluding the Chinese Mainland) are supported. Requests can be scheduled to POPs that are nearest to the users. |