How LinkedIn uses big data to optimize DNS and CDN services for reliability and performance

For vendors and CDN customers alike, a recent presentation from LinkedIn offers a great inside look at how LinkedIn leverages three DNS and six CDN providers.

Linkedin SRE Samir Jaffirali offered up insights at O'Reilly Velocity 2017 on how they do it, including building some custom tools (see the presentation here).

Key takeaway – it’s not easy to do, but the development effort has enabled LinkedIn to provide enhanced redundancy and performance for users, even in the face of DDoS attacks that brought down Dyn DNS users last year. Also, looking ahead, LinkedIn is aiming to build its own CDN for some content types. In-house CDNs have been an issue impacting CDN vendors doing video and large object delivery for some time; LinkedIn shows that trend is going to spread to other types of content, at least among some "web-scale" type clients.