Writer: Lynn Cadet
Editor: Lillian Castro
Reviewer: Cristian Lopez
TL; DR: Traffic congestion can cause the worst delays. But what if there were traffic control to point you in a less crowded direction and speed up your travels? IO River acts as that traffic control for online services in need of better CDN and edge management. IO River connects companies to CDN providers and enables them to leverage complex multi-edge architecture without doing the legwork. We spoke with Edward Tsinovoi, Co-Founder and CEO of IO River, about the platform and how it can transform how businesses approach online performance.
Traffic congestion sucks. I was hit with a double whammy of it a couple of weeks ago on my way to the Magic Kingdom. Anyone who has traveled there knows the misery involved in getting to the Happiest Place in the World. Ironic, right?
After waiting through traffic, a complicated parking setup, and the ferry line, I was finally in. And the day followed with great treats, rides, and memories. But after a fantastic fireworks display, the congestion set in again, as everyone crowded in to get to the exits. Note to self, I’ll have to skip the fireworks show next time, as great as it is.
Whether it’s on the highway or at Disney World, congestion can turn what would otherwise be a short walk or car ride into a much longer trek to your destination. As it happens, the internet had a similar issue known as the “World Wide Wait.”
Content delivery networks, or CDNs, were invented to target this issue and reduce internet congestion back in the late 1990s. Since then, CDNs have become integral to the internet’s operations, allowing end users to get fast and secure content delivery through their global networks of servers.
The CDN industry has also seen immense growth and change since the ‘90s. Although it still works to bring content closer to the user, the content it delivers now has evolved from being primarily static to a more dynamic nature. But issues still exist.
“The industry is still rooted in the mindset of the ‘90s, including the concept that all traffic must pass through a single CDN or edge provider. This concept has slowly collapsed in recent years and for sure cannot meet the challenges in front of us,” said Edward Tsinovoi, Co-Founder and CEO of IO River.
Edward said there is a tsunami of digital content being created and uploaded, especially with AI generation coming into the ranks. Online services can no longer use a single CDN and expect to keep up with the demand. They need more. IO River seeks to make the multi-edge approach mainstream for this reason.
“So the goal of our solution is to allow online services to optimize performance, reliability, and cost by intelligently splitting traffic among multiple edge vendors,” said Edward.
Below, we’ll look at how IO River enables businesses to take on a multi-edge approach and how this approach helps users improve their performance and efficiency.
Build a Multi-Edge Strategy for Better Results
Edward and his business partner Michel Hakimi created IO River in 2022. Since then, the company has made significant progress, which included building its core team and scaling its platform.
In March 2024, IO River raised $5.4 million in funding to advance its reach and mission. And what is that mission? It is to help online services boost performance and traffic speeds with multi-CDN usage.
Edward told us giant corporations have used the multi-CDN or multi-edge approach for years to accelerate loading speeds and stabilize content delivery. So this isn’t a new strategy. But the caveat is that multi-edge architecture isn’t easy to implement, which explains why it isn’t as widespread.
“It’s complicated to implement. So these giant companies assign and build entire engineering organizations to work with this architecture. But large and mid-sized companies struggle to build such architecture,” said Edward.
Here is where IO River enters the picture. IO River solves the issue of complexity and makes the multi-edge approach more accessible. It keeps the traffic flowing for you.
“With IO River, we actually make it possible and easy for everyone to adopt the multi-edge platform strategy in order to improve performance, reliability, and cost of online services,” said Edward.
Integrating multi-edge technology, or as IO River calls it “virtual edge”, is simple with the IO River platform. Its virtual edge solution gives users a unified layer of security and traffic control. Businesses can deploy and orchestrate all their CDN vendors from a single interface and write code at the edge once. Then IO River takes care of the rest.
Once your code is written, IO River ensures it is tested, deployed, and runs across all your Edge providers. IO River supports various CDN providers, including Akamai, Fastly, Cloudflare, and Amazon CloudFront.
By splitting your traffic between multiple providers, IO River enables you to have more resilient and reliable performance across your online services. IO River also takes it one step further by helping users not only split static content but also dynamic traffic and content.
Here are the primary benefits that come with using IO River:
- Effortless implementation with a single interface for monitoring, testing, and routing
- Actionable insights for traffic management with its GlobalView technology
- Low latency and dynamic traffic splitting without compromise
- All-in-one solution with WAF, load balancing, and bot detection management
IO River allows users to tackle everything traffic-related and ensures users have security and ease while doing so.
The Spirit of a Startup
While IO River has accomplished a lot since its launch, Edward told us the team has kept its spirit of being a startup. Edward used to work for Akamai, one of the world’s largest CDN providers, before founding IO River. And he said the difference is outstanding.
“The largest edge platforms have a huge responsibility because a significant portion of the internet’s day-to-day operations are going through their networks. With this huge responsibility, it’s very difficult to innovate and move with agility as when you are a startup,” said Edward.
Giant CDN providers focus most of their attention on ensuring their networks are up and running, since so much of the internet’s functionality depends on them. IO River isn’t essentially a CDN provider. Instead, it leverages those networks to give users a more reliable environment.
“When using IO River, you can split the traffic between two or three of these platforms. If one of these platforms goes down, the customer continues to function and the platform can recover. These platforms invest huge efforts to maintain and improve the reliability,” said Edward.
IO River allows users to have backups within their traffic control. In this way, IO River helps the entire CDN industry by enabling the providers to recover and keep moving forward after downtime.
“These platforms can freeze because there’s so much pressure on them to keep the network running. And it’s difficult to innovate in such a situation. We have much more agility to adjust to the new world of AI and more things happening on the edge,” said Edward.
IO River’s agility enables it to react much faster and easier. So when new edge things appear in the edge, it can address them and even integrate solutions.
Want to Do More at the Edge? IO River Has the Tools
Edward told us new developments are happening on the edge. Some of these developments include data personalization, low latency requirements, and AI-related capabilities.
“Edge compute technologies are developing quickly. There are a lot of capabilities that have been added to allow users to move more and more use cases to the edge. Our goal is to be there from day one to allow customers to leverage these different capabilities,” said Edward.
Edge providers have been busy and have transformed their technology to allow companies to do more at the edge. IO River seeks to implement and combine the capabilities of those different platforms into its unified interface, so users can get the most out of edge capabilities.
“So you as a customer will be able to leverage capabilities of one platform for one type of traffic. From the other side, you can leverage another capability of another platform for another type of traffic. And it will be transparent to you because it doesn’t matter which platform delivers your service,” said Edward.
The edge’s capabilities have become richer in all aspects, including security. As it happens, they have also spilled over into AI territory. Now that anyone can create content on the edge, it has opened doors for people to implement AI use cases there and leverage the edge’s low latency.
“Companies want to have AI with extremely low latency. So many edge providers are working to build edge capabilities for AI. And IO River will be there to provide the holistic solution that will allow you to run those future AI use cases on the edge,” said Edward.
