Our LowEndBox Interview Series has featured many interesting personalities so far and today we’re excited to bring you an interview with the founder of jsdelivr, Dmitriy Akulov.  This is a very cool project which offers free CDN services to a huge array of FOSS projects.  They’re serving billions of request per month all over the globe.  I think you’ll find this interview an interesting read and case study of how a small idea can grow into massive planet-critical infrastructure.

First, who are you and where in the world are you located?

My name is Dmitriy Akulov and I live in Krakow, Poland. Originally I am from Ukraine but I grew up and went to school in Greece.

Tell us what jsdelivr is all about and what the project’s goals are.

jsDelivr is a free multi-CDN for open source projects, developers and webmasters.

Currently we proxy all of Github, npm registry and WordPress addons registry. This means we can load any file located on those services.

Developers get an easy to use method to distribute their code without having to pay for commercial CDN services or think about infrastructure management and devops.

Website owners use jsDelivr as a quick method to grab and load the libraries and files they need while at the same time optimizing the performance of their websites.

Currently we utilize Cloudflare, Fastly and Stackpath to provide the best possible performance and uptime to our users. In mainland China we have an ICP license and use Quantil to serve our content.

What inspired you to begin this project?

It was always a challenge to find the libraries you need, download them, upload them, add the correct paths… And later you would have to keep them updated by repeating the same process.

So I had the idea to build a better Google Hosted Libraries with community contributed libraries, an easy to use interface and a big focus on performance and availability.

Managing servers was always something I enjoyed, and so building the infrastructure for this was a really exciting project for me.  

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