Multi-CDN Exposed: Why Your 'Redundancy' Isn't Real

Often touted as the ultimate insurance policy against outages, multi-CDNs can lull businesses into a false sense of security. In this QuickCast, we pull back the curtain on the hidden dangers and often-overlooked realities of multi-CDN deployments. While the promise is seamless recovery, the reality includes high 'premiums' and 'deductibles'—the significant impact incidents still cause. More critically, we uncover how diverse CDN providers can surprisingly share identical underlying network infrastructure. This critical flaw means a single fiber cut can take down multiple "redundant" CDNs, rendering your elaborate failover strategy useless. This episode stresses the paramount importance of scrutinizing foundational network design over simply counting CDN vendors for true resilience.

Key Takeaways

• Multi-CDNs are frequently presented as an outage insurance policy, but rarely deliver seamless recovery during significant incidents.
• Expect high "premiums" and "deductibles" from multi-CDNs, as incidents can still have considerable impact.
• Adding more CDN vendors doesn't guarantee true redundancy if they all depend on the same underlying network infrastructure.
• A single fiber cut can disable multiple supposedly redundant CDNs if they share the affected network path.
• Genuine network resilience demands a deep evaluation of underlying network architecture and capacity, not just the number of CDN providers used.