

Show HN: A CDN for API Calls - dedalus
http://www.prontoapi.com/

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sv123
Why not use any other CDN for API calls?

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dedalus
Out of the box, no CDN has a purpose built product to address this. The
closest I have seen addressing the problem is that from Varnish :
[https://www.varnish-software.com/product/varnish-api-
acceler...](https://www.varnish-software.com/product/varnish-api-acceleration)

However most CDNs will try to cache it but not provide acceleration for
dynamic ones.

In my case you are always guarateed 1 round trip between pronto nodes for
dynamic traffic and cache whatever we can

On top of it, I am doing dedpulication/compression of JSON

Finally a CDN bills on bytes thus making it less profitable for them whereas
we bill on number of requests

Hope that clarifies why a CDN doesnt cut it for APIs

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thomasfromcdnjs
Not sure why this is getting up-voted, it is incomplete and does't do
anything?

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dedalus
I cannot be responsible for upvoting,but can you help me understand what more
is needed to make it complete

Also if you have an API to accelerate, please let know and we shall be happy
to accelerate it. (to prove that it does something, namely, cut your API
response time in half)

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youngtaff
Sorry, don't get why I wouldn't just use a CDN like Akamai, or Fastly or
another to do this - many of them have features that will 'speed up' APIs

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dedalus
See above. API calls have a per use cache rather than one cached object to
serve to many thus decreasing the cache hit ratio which makes it inconvenient
for any CDN to make money

Also existing CDNs think this market is too small for them to invest.

The difference is that of a purpose built platform versus a generic one

