Maygh: building a CDN from client web browsers

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the web has provided dramatic improvements in the ease of sharing content. Unfortunately, the costs of distributing this content are largely incurred by web site operators; popular web sites are required to make substantial monetary investments in serving infrastructure or cloud computing resources---or must pay other organizations (e.g., content distribution networks)---to help serve content. Previous approaches to offloading some of the distribution costs onto end users have relied on client-side software or web browser plug-ins, providing poor user incentives and dramatically limiting their scope in practice. In this paper, we present Maygh, a system that builds a content distribution network from client web browsers, without the need for additional plug-ins or client-side software. The result is an organically scalable system that distributes the cost of serving web content across the users of a web site. Through simulations based on real-world access logs from Etsy (a large e-commerce web site that is the 50th most popular web site in the U.S.), microbenchmarks, and a small-scale deployment, we demonstrate that Maygh provides substantial savings to site operators, imposes only modest costs on clients, and can be deployed on the web sites and browsers of today. In fact, if Maygh was deployed to Etsy, it would reduce network bandwidth due to static content by 75% and require only a single coordinating server.