Software-Defined Edge Storage

Traditional edge architectures are built on single-purpose cache servers that are slow to scale, expensive to refresh, and painful to maintain. In this talk I’ll show how a software-defined edge-storage layer running on commodity hosts can unlock both performance and operational agility for streaming-video services. To ground the discussion, I’ll present two real-world use cases that push caching far beyond conventional CDN applications Inflight entertainment systems – how the same software defined edge storage runs on an aircraft’s server, seat-back screens, and even passenger or crew tablets. Remote-site caching – serving oil rigs, mines, and pop-up news bureaus by installing the cache on existing desktop PCs or spare rack servers already on site, eliminating the need for dedicated hardware shipments and slashing start-up time from weeks to hours. A “high-availability” server is still one failure domain, while our distributed edge-storage layer balances requests across all nodes so no single host is overloaded and the service stays healthy even as nodes join or leave the cluster. I’ll unpack the techniques that make this possible.