26th November, 2014
6 Min read
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The Web is Getting Slower – the Why’s and the How’s
Despite the technological advancement and a breakthrough in CDN the Internet is getting slower. The main 2 reasons are:
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- The Internet architecture is complicated, outdated & ever expanding
- With mobile, the Internet is used in radically different ways today
Internet is crucial for companies nowadays, but firms fail at application performance optimization, and for 4 main reasons:
Digital experience delivery is complex
Physically getting content to end-users is complicated. There are both front-end and back-end elements to account for. End-users across the world access the web in incredibly diverse ways. Delivery of digital experiences must take into account device type, operating system, browser, network, and physical location. . Content delivery is reliant on a multitude of applications and software working together.
User attitudes are changing, ang getting things done right is the priority
That’s no longer the case. User attitudes demand content be fully optimized to their unique context be it mobile, tablet or desktop. Sky-high user expectations and shortened attention spans equate to a complete intolerance for sub-standard digital experiences, where the majority of users demand a page load of 2 seconds or faster.
Use IT for full optimization
The first priority should always be security. The consequences of a security fail lead to user dissatisfaction, bad customer experience and the general loss of business and revenue. IT is also wary of change, due to increased risk exposure.
Technology cannot keep pace
When mobile user numbers surged, companies rushed to create separate m.site (mobile) applications. This strategy quickly fell from grace when it became apparent that separate sites for desktop and mobile were: (1) terrible for SEO (2) doubled the amount of effort needed to maintain applications. Today’s “triggered technology” is responsive web design (RWD). It involves simplification of desktop mobile content to automatically resize and render itself well on mobile devices.
The Web will grow more mobile and complex. As it grows, the slower it will get. Modern businesses must focus on users and user experience strategies. User satisfaction is everything, and to achieve it, you need a site that’s up and running, and satisfies customers, viewers and users.
Check the full article at Yotta.
The Responsive Web Design Journey: the Crossroad Between Devices and Image Manipulation
Everything went mobile. Nowdays, every device can access sites and apps. As potential buyers, consumers, viewers, users and ad consumers, sites need to satisfy every need of a mobile browser. A whole Responsive Web Design strategy may include many different angles and aspects, and may seem overwhelming but we have good news.
You can start from something simple and extremely effective: adapting the images. The heaviest content delivered on pages are images, they take about 40% of the site’s load weight. The following happens when mobile users access a page online:
- A smaller device, so images don’t need as much quality as in a 17″ screen.
- A less powerful processor, so they render images slower
- Probably worse bandwidth, so it takes more time to download the same amount of information.
The only logical step to take is to apply a strategy to modify the site’s content in order to make it lighter, and doing so, easier to access and browse. Start with a RWD strategy just by manipulating the images delivered to mobile devices so they are smaller, lighter, and probably even with different aspect ratio.
Akamai developed the product Image Converter, one of the first Cloudlets that Akamai has released: this is a process executed and performed at the edge intended to, on top of increase performance, solve one individual business issue: in this case, the dynamic manipulation of images on the fly.
Full story and service display at Akamai.
Video Dominates Mobile Networks, Ericsson Report Reveals
The latest Ericsson Mobility Report, that mainly focuses on mobile trends and leveraging big data from live networks, suggests that mobile technology is still growing rapidly and that the vide consumption on devices continues. Ninety percent of the world’s population over six years old is predicted to have a mobile phone by 2020. Furthermore, by 2020 smartphone subscriptions are forecast to top 6.1 billion.
Video dominates mobile networks, increasingly appearing as part of other online apps, such as news and adverts, and on social media platform. Devices used to watch video are also evolving. Many have larger screens, enabling higher picture quality for streamed video, which results in video being consumed on all types of devices and in higher quantities, both at home and on the move. Ericsson estimates that mobile video traffic will increase tenfold by 2020; making 55% of all mobile data traffic. 5G is expected to drop in 2020 and the technology is predicted to have a faster uptake than 4G LTE. 5G will also encompass evolved versions of existing radio access, coud and core tech to craft new ways that mobile technology will be used.
Full article at TVBEurope.
3 Trends To Incorporate into a Business Technology Strategy
- Everything is Online, all the Time
57% of the U.S. population owns a smartphone. SP users unlock their phones on average 150 times a day. mCommerce will exceed $700 billion by 2017, making mobile a mind shift. The customer is king, and the king demands that applications and experiences conform to user contexts. - Analyze and Adapt: Understand Context and Security
Today, a site that truly adapts the user experience to an end user’s context is novel, but with the Internet of Things (IoT) this will no longer be an optional step in delivering an online experience. Big Data isn’t data, it’s answers. Gartner predicts that in 2015 businesses will leverage analytics to improve online security through real-time access controls and self-protection measures. Analytics expose the signals and patterns that IT firsms turn into logical steps of action. - “Everything-as-a-Service”
Evolutions in application delivery that go beyond CDN are tackling global distribution and a cloud-client operating model. To sustain the pace of online innovation, businesses must rely on elastic cloud networks that in turn employ intelligent capacity based scalability – both vertically and horizontally – as the use case demands. Cloud-based management and automation will be critical for every online business to scale in order to serve these expanding usage models and embrace software-defined applications and services to attain Web-scale IT.
For more info, check Yottaa blog.
Multi-Cloud deployments on the rise, while barriers to entry continue to fall
Multi-Cloud means using multiple clouds for your web or mobile application deployment. This could be using AWS in two separate locations, or it could be a heterogeneous deployment with AWS, Rackspace, Joyent or any of a host of the emerging Cloud providers. More and more businesses are deploying across multiple regions and vendors.
There are 3 main reasons to do so:
- Performance – driving traffic to the Cloud infrastructure will perform best for a specific request is important, basically, making your performance faster.
- Availability – active DR has become a reality and there is nothing more important than application availability
- Costs – vendor diversity is important to avoid lock-in. Negotiations can be ugly when your vendor knows you have no viable choice but them.
The emergence of Paas Architectures and frameworks like Docker are allowing Enterprises to extrapolate away from the cloud specific infrastructure and deploy across multiple regions and multiple heterogeneous clouds in a way that was really difficult just a few years ago. The barrier to entry for Multi-Cloud has officialy dropped.
Check the full article at Cedexis Blog.
DoS attacks using Obama’s press releases
Akamai has issued a security bulletin about a new form of Domain Name Service-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that emerged in October. DNS reflection attacks (also known as DNS amplification attacks) use forged requests to a DNS server for the Internet Protocol address and other information about a specific host and domain name.
DNS requests are usually sent using the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which is “connectionless.” It doesn’t require that a connection be negotiated between the requester and the server before data is sent to make sure it’s going to the right place. By forging the return address on the DNS request sent to make it look like it came from the target, an attacker can get a significant boost in the size of a DDoS attack. The new attack type expands the attack size by exploiting the TXT record for a domain.
A TXT record for a domain can be up to 255 characters—a significant boost over the relatively small size of the request sent for it. The attacks lasted for over 5 hours during each episode, pumping the traffic up to 4 Gb per second. The attacks can sometimes be stopped at the edge of the network, but that usually requires having more bandwidth available than the size of the attack; without a DDoS protection such as Akamai or Cloudfare, pages are wounerable to similar attacks.
Read more at ARS Technica.