Hi folks - I've noticed a problem that we seem to run into over and over in our environment, and would like to suggest a way to fix.
Often times, I find that delivery services get assigned to cache servers in a very inconsistent way, due in part to the fact that assigning severs to a DS is a very manual process today. It seems to me that there is a need here to have something like "server group profiles". For example, for a given CDN you could have a "pre-production" profile consisting of a small slice of caches, to be used for functional testing. There would also be a "production" profile, consisting of the full compliment of caches that should be in use at any given time. I envision this being used in such a way, that Ops folks would control the contents of those profiles as needed, and that a default server group profile (i.e. "production" profile) would be ASSIGNED BY DEFAULT to any brand new Delivery Service that gets built, unless explicitly overridden. I think this would really make administration of server assignments much simpler, as you can do it at a profile level, rather than having to touch every DS individually to make changes. ALSO, this would solve the inconsistency problem. ALSO ALSO, I think this should be an absolute requirement for eventual self-service, because customers that are managing their own DS'es SHOULD NOT have to care at all about edge server specifics, or what edges their DS should be assigned to. We've seen that our actual CDN team members can't always manage these details consistently, so there's little hope that customers should be expected to do so. Thanks, __Jason
