Hybrid CDNs
Not every streaming platform is going to fit neatly into the build or buy camp. And in these cases, it’s worth considering a hybrid CDN strategy. In this model, you can build and operate your own CDN in regions where you experience consistently heavy viewership, where traffic patterns are well understood and scale justifies the investment. Then, for unpredictable demand spikes, smaller markets (or as a safety net during outages), tap into a third-party CDN solution. This hybrid approach combines cost efficiency and flexibility - allowing platforms to minimize long-term expenses without sacrificing performance or coverage.
How to build your own CDN
Building your own CDN is a significant systems and operations effort. But with careful planning, the long-term performance and efficiency gains can be huge. If you’re ready to consider building your own CDN, consider these three central foundations:
1. Architecture design
There are four key components that make up any CDN architecture: Origin servers (the primary server that receives encoded video segments), edge servers (geographically distributed servers close to end viewers), a control plane (for orchestration, configuration and monitoring), and routing mechanisms (e.g, a GeoDNS to route client requests to the nearest or best-performing edge server).
This type of architecture can be deployed on several different infrastructure setups - virtual machines, bare metal, or a hybrid approach with a portion of the CDN architecture implemented on bare metal (for its performance stability and cost efficiency at scale) and another in a virtualized cloud environment (for its rapid and instant scaling capabilities). The CDN software sits on top of your origin and edge servers offering a full set of content delivery features including load balancing, persistent storage engines, and caching rules.
It’s also important to evaluate your concurrent viewership and factor in contingency compute for any unexpected demand spikes. If you’re combining bare metal and virtualized infrastructure as part of your CDN architecture, this is when that virtualized compute would kick in. In the streaming world, demand spikes are inevitable around popular events (think sporting events like the SuperBowl, for instance), so this is a critical step.
2. Points of Presence (PoP)
An important step when building a CDN is to identify the best geographical locations for your origin servers and edge servers. Origin servers should be located as close to production as possible to reduce the round-trip time for data requests. Edge servers should be located as close to viewers, with specific PoPs chosen based on audience hubs, anticipated growth in particular regions, and common traffic patterns.
If you choose to host your servers through an infrastructure-as-a-service provider, then available data center locations should be a key consideration. Partner with a vendor with data center locations close to your end users and consider taking a multi-vendor approach so you have access to a wider pool of data center locations.
It’s exactly the approach real-time video platform nanocosmos takes to ensure their real-time video streaming platform always delivers the highest quality content: “We collaborate with multiple partners and are continually seeking new partnerships to strengthen our position,” said Oliver Lietz, CEO of nanocosmos. “We chose bare metal from servers.com to widen our infrastructure provider list for our StreamCloud CDN and through the partnership we’ve been able to achieve better coverage in Europe, Asia and the United States.”
3. Redundancy
To avoid downtime or interrupted services, it’s important to build multiple levels of redundancy into your CDN architecture, including:
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Server redundancy: Implement RAID, back up data on backup servers or storage devices, and use load balancing to distribute traffic across multiple servers
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Geographic redundancy: Deploy multiple PoPs per region and ensure enough spare compute to absorb failover capacity so users aren’t impacted even if one PoP is lost
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Network and routing redundancy: Use multiple DNS providers and multiple upstream ISPs per PoP to ensure users can always reach an edge server
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Load redundancy: Ensure strict capacity limits for each region and PoP to avoid server overload cascades that could result in major failures
Recent cloud provider outages have made the need for redundancy even more present. Several large streaming platforms including Disney+ were impacted by the major AWS outage which occurred in October 2025, with users reporting difficulty accessing streams on the platform. Similarly, the outage impacted communications platforms like Slack, causing intermittent failures, failed message delivery, and login issues.
“Today’s massive AWS outage is a visceral reminder of the risks of over-reliance on two dominant cloud providers, an outage most of us will have felt in some way,” said Nicky Stewart, Senior Advisor at the Open Cloud Coalition.
Every streaming platform should be implementing a disaster recovery plan that includes robust redundancy measures to ensure fast recovery after an unplanned incident such as damage to the data hall, natural disasters, cyber-attacks, and server failure.
Choose the right CDN strategy for your business
For many platforms, commercial CDNs remain a fast, low-risk way to achieve reliable content delivery. But as traffic volumes grow and requirements become more specific, a custom content delivery network can offer clear advantages. With the ability to fine-tune architectures and choose optimal PoPs, building your own CDN can ultimately become a strategic asset rather than a burden. With the right planning partners, the initial complexity can be overcome to unlock long-term performance and efficiency at scale.
