2021 was a very busy year. We dealt with improving our products, releasing new features, opening new locations, and solving our clients’ difficult tasks.
Now we would like to sum up what we have achieved in 2021 and share our most important accomplishments with you.
What we have done in 2021
- We have improved our products. We have added dozens of new features and enhanced the existing ones.
- We have expanded our network so that now it has over 140 points of presence. We have launched more than 50 new CDN locations and 14 cloud points.
- We have improved peering. Now we are present in 100+ traffic exchange points.
- We have received our first streaming development patent.
- We have confirmed our market leadership: we were given the first positions in 20+ independent international ratings and awards.
- We have expanded our company’s staff so that now it has 400+ people.
- In 2021, our company’s average annual growth rate exceeded 41%.
And now let’s go deep into detail.
Our major service changes
1. Support for the HESP protocol. In September, we joined the HESP Alliance, meaning that now the Gcore’s CDN supports a new streaming protocol. This protocol allows you to broadcast your videos with the delay making up less than one second and to easily scale your broadcasts shown to millions of viewers.
2.Managed Kubernetes. We have launched a new cloud service to automate container management. We described its main features in detail in our article called “Managed Kubernetes: a new cloud service”.
3. CDN with web protection. We have integrated a new Basic Web Protection feature into the CDN control panel. It follows the WAF principle in its work and protects clients against DDoS attacks as well as against other most common threats listed in the current OWASP Top10 list.
4. Intel SGX virtual machines. We have integrated code and data protection technologies into our virtual instances.
5. Own Terraform provider. Now our CDN, cloud, and DNS can be managed using Terraform. In the end of 2021, our provider was successfully verified by HashiCorp and included in the list of official Terraform Registry providers.
6. PCI DSS certification. Our Cloud has received a certificate confirming that it meets the PCI DSS 3.2.1 standard. This means that we have confirmed our infrastructure’s high security and ability to work with payment data.
Here are a few other things that are worth mentioning:
- We have integrated our DNS hosting with the Gcore’s CDN.
- We have updated our plugin meant for connecting the CDN with WordPress and added a Grafana plugin.
- We have added a permanent API token to facilitate your work with our services.
- We implemented the option for our clients to register and log in to our service control panel using their Google and GitHub accounts.
- We have launched 142,044 new virtual machines and 1,463 bare metal servers.
New locations
In 2021, 55+ new points of presence joined our CDN. We were particularly active in expanding our network capacities in Asia and in the Middle East.
14 new locations have joined our Cloud:
- 3 in Europe: Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris
- 2 in the USA: Chicago and Santa Clara
- 3 in Asia: Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore
- 1 in Central Asia: Almaty
- 1 in Turkey: Istanbul
2021: major awards and achievements
1. We were included in the top 10 global networks by the number of direct peerings. This means that our network’s connectivity has become even better and that from now on we will transfer data even faster.
2. We received a patent for the development of a sustainable transcoding system for our Streaming Platform. The new technology will improve the stability of our transcoding system and enhance the delivery of video content to audiences that exceed 1 million viewers.
3. We became the winners of the Streaming Media European Readers’ Choice Awards. This award event in the streaming industry is held by the world’s largest media holding. Our CDN took the first place in the Content Delivery and Distribution category, and our Streaming Platform won silver in the Live Streaming Platform/Service category.
4. Gcore Cloud entered top 3 of the world’s cloud providers. Our Cloud took the third place in the independent international cloud services rating prepared by Market.CNews.
5. First positions in CDN provider ratings. Several international media included our network in their top lists. Branch portals reviewing IT solutions for business named the Gcore’s CDN one of the best CDNs in the world.
Our plans for 2022
We are going to launch some new cloud services including central logging, database management, FaaS, and more. We will add support for the HTTP/3 protocol and prepare our infrastructure for 5G integration. We are planning to open more new locations. We will improve our service control panel in order to make our services even more convenient to use.
We will do our best to provide our clients with ideal solutions to their problems—from starting a small online project to building their own 3D world in the metaverse.
Our services help make the Internet faster, safer, and more reliable. And we will continue developing our services to meet these standards.
