[afnog] privacy vs caching

[Mark Tinka]

On Monday, December 22, 2014 12:39:35 PM Andrew Alston 
wrote:

> With regards to the latency tradeoff.  I can understand
> the needs to solve the latency problems, though I would
> ask at what cost when introducing these types of
> solutions.  My experience with caching at an ISP level
> has not been positive.  The benefits in terms of traffic
> saved were questionable at best when considering the
> cost of the devices, and the performance improvement I
> saw in my testing didn¹t justify the expense. I¹d rather
> spend the money improving the network to drive down the
> latencies.

I tend to agree.

Centralized web caching was marginally useful in the late 
90's to early 2000's where there was much more static 
content; and even then, achieving anything higher than a 40% 
hit ratio was hard enough.

I can't imagine what the hit ratios would be today. I gave 
up on this type of caching in 2007. It does not scale well.

You do see this kind of caching coming back, with vendors 
trying to offer alternatives to pure-play CDN providers such 
as Akamai, Level(3), Limelight, e.t.c. For targeted use-
cases (such as network-based DVR's for IPTv deployments), it 
could make sense on a per-city or per-town basis, but this 
is a specialized problem already which comes with a lot of 
other poor (but necessary) practices anyway :-).

> With the advent of GGC caches, Facebook caches, and large
> scale CDN devices on net and on continent, I¹m just not
> sure that caching to the point of breaking encryption is
> really worth it.  Especially when in Africa, we are busy
> moving away from the paradigm of 500ms latencies and
> traffic all looping back through Europe, and into an era
> where real bandwidth, decent latencies and proper
> on-continent peering is a reality.

We run a wholesale network, and as such, do not beleive in 
touching customer's packets (I have the same belief if it 
were a retail network). If customers want centralized web 
caching, they can do it themselves (and many of them do).

We do support CDN's, as those scale better when it comes to 
localizing/distributing content.

I know that some CDN's in Africa now support HTTPS content. 
I would welcome looking at this as a possible solution for 
achieving encryption and low latency simultaneously.

Mark.
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