Announcing MicroCDN and SashiDo Files Service

by Georgi N. Georgiev

For today's mobile applications and websites is essential to deliver a significant amount of static content to the end users. This content includes images, videos, documents and any other unique digital goods that modern businesses are producing. As these static assets grow in number and size, bandwidth usage swells and page load times increase, deteriorating the browsing experience for your users and reducing your servers' available capacity.

The primary challenges digital businesses are facing today is the latency and coverage of the mobile network. 3G or 4G networks make more than 70% of the mobile app's traffic.

To dramatically reduce page load times, improve performance, and reduce your bandwidth and infrastructure costs, you can implement a CDN, or content delivery network, to cache these assets across a set of geographically distributed servers.

How SashiDo store the apps files

As you're already aware, SashiDo is a complete managed service, and for that reason, it's our job to handle all the challenges about where our customers are storing their static content and how their apps deliver it to their end users.

To provide highly scalable and stable file storage and delivery solution for the Parse Servers we are hosting we saw that AWS S3 would be an excellent foundation for that challenge.

What is µCDN for SashiDo Files

Two years since we've launched the SashiDo Platform we decided that's time to change the way applications deliver their static assets and take it to another level.

When we started working on the new SashiDo Files Service and µCDN (MicroCDN) we set a couple of goals we must achieve.

  • Performance
  • Better User Experience
  • Happy Customers

Why SashiDo Files Service

A year ago we announced the SashiDo Push Notifications Service, and we had a clear idea of what we want to achieve:

  • Send push notifications as quickly as possible
  • No notification can be dropped, ever
  • Perform well under high loads and don't consume too many resources
  • Save as much as possible resources into the Parse Server containers.

In other words with the SashiDo Push Notifications Service, every Parse Application hosted here can send Millions Push Notifications per minute while at the same it's handling API requests without any issues.

Following the same principles, the SashiDo Files Service was born. How we did this:

As a result, we've achieved up to 3x better performance.

Why µCDN

With the SashiDo Files Service, we are uploading the files much faster now, but we were aware that this was only 50% of our goal. That's why we changed the way how we deliver the files from AWS S3 by adding a MicroCDN layer with microZones support.

µZones (microZones)

Today our Parse Server infrastructure is running on four continents around the globe. Following the same concept, we've launched four microZones that will handle the files delivery based on where your Parse Server is hosted.

For example, if your Parse Server is hosted in our infrastructure Europe, your files will be delivered by the Europe mircoZone and etc.

These are the SashiDo's microZones:

  • Europe µZone: Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Luxembourg, Bucharest, Paris

  • Americas µZone: Seattle, Phoenix, Miami, Chicago, Denver, New York, Dallas, Ashburn, Los Angeles, Palo Alto, San Jose, Toronto, Montreal, Sao Paulo

  • Asia µZone: Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Chennai, Hyderabad

  • Australia µZone: Sydney

How to enable this feature and how much does it cost?

The SashiDo Files Service + µCDN is enabled by default for every application hosted on SashiDo for FREE!

Fin

We hope that this significant change in our files delivery architecture will improve your customers' experience and will drastically increase your revenue.