“The roll-out of Apple’s new mobile-operating system Wednesday was the first time the company used its proprietary data distribution infrastructure, also called a content-delivery network, for such a large-scale deployment,” Drew Fitzgerald reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“And it was a massive challenge at that. At one point, iOS 8 downloads chewed up more than 3 terabits of bandwidth each second, according to data from Internet researcher DeepField,” Fitzgerald reports. “‘It really was a significant coming out party for the Apple CDN,” DeepField Chief Executive Craig Labovitz said. ‘This is definitely a realization that Apple is not just a software player. They’re not just a maker of PCs. They have an Internet backbone and an international Internet presence.'”
“An in-house network involves heavy upfront costs but can save money in the long run,” Fitzgerald reports. “Apple’s network is the culmination of a lengthy effort to build a world-wide network that gives it more control over how its software and customer data traverse the Internet.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
What Apple’s new content delivery network means for so-called ‘net neutrality’ – and for you – August 19, 2014
Apple’s content delivery network now live; paid interconnect deals with ISPs, massive capacity in place – August 1, 2014
Apple’s content delivery network is reportedly live and it’s positively massive – July 31, 2014
Apple negotiating paid interconnect deals with ISPs for their own Content Delivery Network – May 20, 2014
and it delivered flawlessly!!
Didn’t work for me when I tried, just after it was released.
First time I’ve experienced a hiccup
I updated my iPad through iTunes, and at work on a university network, and the download took about 1.5 mins, and that was during the middle of the battle (about an hour into the release).
In the past I’ve always had issues downloading on he day of release due to volume. This year it went flawless. I tried my iPhone to see how bad the delay would be but it downloaded in less than two minutes. I figured it was a fluke but none of the family’s devices had even a hiccup during the upgrade.
Perfect!
Took me all of 12 hours to download the update for my iPhone. I did it through iTunes though!
I upgraded 4 devices in total here in the UK with a 16megabit/sec broadband connection. 2 did not finish overnight (?) and the other two took several hours. I have no explanation as to why.
Phone updated in about 15 minutes here. On the worst Time Warner connection in existence (time to go to fios today, I think). In the past it’s usually taken a few tries on much better networks… I was surprised at how well it worked. With that much data pounding through, there will always be glitches, but I’d be surprised if this wasn’t all on the ISP end and not Apple at this point.
Is 3tb/s DDOS proof? Just asking.
Not necessarily. DDOS attacks aren’t just about exceeding network bandwidth, they can also succeed when the number of individual connections being maintained is too much for the server application to handle.
Continuity/Handoff does not seem to be working between ipad/iphone. Anybody else notice this?
This was a huge improvements to previous year. Looking forward to Apple using it’s CDN for everything else and their own future presentation (iPad is due in a couple of weeks) to go better than last time. Apple does not need Amazon.
Looks like they ended up having to use Limelight and Akamai at some point to lighten the load. Wouldn’t declare it a success.