The CDN Alliance, a standards group for the content delivery network industry, has announced its first three working groups.

The three groups - Dictionary, Low Latency and Traffic Radar - address important issues in Edge networking, where CDNs have established an important role.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) emerged in the late 1990s, with players like Akamai and Cloudflare speeding up web page performance by caching content close to users.

More recently, Edge computing emerged as a way to achieve essentially the same thing, and CDN players have extended their offerings to do more than caching, handling services closer to users.

The CDN Alliance was formed in 2021 to represent the CDN community. Thus far, its members consist of a group of some 16 smaller CDN players and companies offering related services, such as GCore, Backblaze, Tinify, NPAW, and others.

The three groups were chosen to represent challenges picked up by members of the group. The CDN Alliance release doesn't provide much detail on the aims of the new groups, which its says have been set up jointly with other organizations.

The groups are already up and running, having been holding bi-weekly meetings, and are due to start delivering outputs in 2024.

“The first focus of the CDN Alliance has been to fulfill our ‘Connect’ promise as part of our mission, connecting the CDN Industry and the CDN Community through the CDN Alliance Connect events, our CDN Community Platform, and other activities that were important to focus on last year,” said Mark de Jong, Chairman of the CDN Alliance. "With these activities being established and geared towards growth for the upcoming years, the launch of the working groups is the next exciting step in building a stronger CDN Industry and CDN Ecosystem."

The Alliance's release says the group has been active in policy issues such as "cookie deprecation," the EU's NIS2 security directive, and the EU's "Fair Share" telecom reform proposals.

New members and new activities are expected soon, the group says.