The relationship of the Cloud and the CDN is currently an area of intense interest. How will the Cloud relate to the CDN? Will the Cloud be built on the CDN or will the Cloud subsume the CDN? Will the features of CDN (like geo-locating users and replication of data across regions) be carried over onto the Cloud? How can the CDN use the Cloud for extensible and fungible capacity?

One use case that has been of interest for years is the ability to stream into the enterprise (read ‘behind the firewall’). This has long been a problem for large enterprises that would like to enable corporate communications across multiple locations. Companies such as KonTiki have specialized in solving this problem. Adobe® Flash® Media Server 4.0 specifically has features that are focused on ‘Multicasting’ streams using a combination of peer assistance and true multicasting to enable enterprise streaming without bringing down the corporate network. Octoshape has a similar technology solution to solve for this same use case.

While these solutions are fine for working around the limitations of the corporate firewall, they do come with the disadvantages of forcing enterprises to build dedicated infrastructure to support these streaming events. At the very least, there are servers and software that the IT group must support and there are peer programs that are downloaded on local viewers’ boxes. These software assets can cause problems on the users’ systems, and many administrators prefer not to have these applications running in the background on their users’ machines.

So let’s look at another alternative to this scenario. Suppose we have a CDN and a Cloud. Suppose further that that Cloud could be used as an extension of the CDN for additional streaming capacity. Assume that that extensible capacity could be spun up on demand to manage a live event with a huge viral uptake. This extensible CDN feature of the Cloud would be extendable to a private Cloud within the firewall. This private Cloud could also spin up streaming resources from the CDN. These resources could service a live streaming event within and outside the firewall and would know how to spin-down or clean up these resources once the event has transpired. There would be no servers or software specific to streaming events that IT would have to support. They would only need to support the general purpose Cloud and CDN accounts.

This is a different way to think about the future of enterprise streaming than is currently being pursued. But it’s an interesting way. Do you dare imagine a CDN-Cloud that solves your enterprise streaming problems?

The thorny issue of net neutrality continues to wind its way through our government with the latest being a vote in the House of Representatives that overturned the FCC’s ability to regulate the Internet. It seems inevitable the issue will not soon be resolved as President Obama vows to veto the Resolution of Disapproval. Opinions appear to be largely divided along party lines.

I suppose I should first stop and wonder at how far the Internet has come in the preceding decades. It doesn’t seem that long ago I was working at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science and it was hard to find many people outside of the building who had even heard of the Internet. The commercial success of the Internet has been so great that it shouldn’t surprise anyone that legislation is increasingly swirling around. I think we largely dodged a bullet with the Internet Tax Freedom Act, but Net Neutrality is a more complex issue.

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Winter 2011 has been brutal, everywhere from Atlanta to Maine and beyond. Thankfully, due to IP-enabled devices such as smartphones, wireless routers and printers, we haven’t all had to dig our way out of the snow banks to get work done. Embedded machines that automate our lives have made it possible to work from home – and anywhere else – while taking breaks to shovel our driveways and build the occasional snow fort.

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