Akamai Edge14 Report, StreamZillas’ new CDN, VCL for Drupal & Fastly and more news

2014 Akamai Edge Conference Report

Akamai Edge is the premier event for Internet innovators, tech professionals and online business pioneers who together are forging a Faster Forward World. GlobalDots attended the 2014 Akamai Edge Conference, spanning from October 6th (pre-conference) to October 10th.

The conference included a showcase of Akamai’s new products and solutions. CEO of Akamai, Dr. Tom Leighton the opened the event, focusing on the IoT, calling it a hyper-connected world. Followed up by inspiring presentation of Red Bulls Media House CTO Andreas Gall, the conference was packed with intensive workshops, panel discussions and product announcements. Akamai once again proved it’s by far the key player in CDN / Cloud industry with clear vision and remarkable innovation and execution.

Key takeaways and links for further reading:

• Akamai Edge Website
• New Akamai Community Website
• EdgeTv Live videos
• Edge14 – Tom Leighton Keynote Presentation – Meeting the Grand Challenges of the Internet
• Edge14 – Rick McConnell Keynote Presentation – Roadmap to Innovation
• Edge14 – Fastest Growing Spectator Sport: Major League Gaming – Mike Sepso – Presentation
• The Future of Web Performance: Are Today’s Good Practices Tomorrow’s Performance Anti-Patterns?
• Introducing Cloudlets @ Akamai Edge 2014
• IKEA – Maintaining the Balance: Getting the Most of Your CDN
• Million Browser Botnet-Edge 2014
• Responsive & Fast (Iterating Live) – Edge 2014
• Evolution of TLS and SSL
• Akamai Ion Web Performance Solution Now Faster, Easier and more Intelligent
• The Best of #AkamaiEdge 2014!

StreamZilla Unveils the World’s Largest Content Delivery Network

StreamZilla, the provider of streaming media delivery solutions that power hundreds of customers around the globe, announced it’s new CDN solution that combines the federated CDNs of various providers including Amazon, LeaseWeb and Level 3 among others. This new CDN leverages not only its own network infrastructure but by using various APIs also uses its partner CDNs as its own edge nodes. The offering comes with all of StreamZilla’s advanced features including instant provisioning, real-time transmuxing, cache purging and analytics among others. The Adaptive CDN solution has its own algorithms of finding and selecting the nodes from its partner networks to ensure both highest performance as well as lowest bandwidth costs. StreamZilla expressed their satisfaction with their new offering.

Read more at CDN Advisor.

Teaming Up With Catch Digital to Write VCL for Drupal and Fastly

Drupal is a widely used content management system with more than one million users, designed to integrate with caching layers and content delivery networks (CDNs). For all other requests, the cookies are filtered down to just the session, and no-cache cookies preserve only the functionality that Drupal needs. If all the backends are unhealthy, cookies can be removed to allow the cache lookup to send anonymous (unlogged in) pages to clients so that they get a reasonable response. Error pages are set to cache for 10 minutes only. To make sure clients don’t just see a nasty Varnish error, any failures are sent via the error function and a customized error message is sent in its place. In this way, it allows Drupal to control the caching times for most objects as needed and ensures the best user experience.

Full story at Fastly Blog.

Five Cyber Security Strategies for 2014

Retailers essentially need to be mindful of the ways in which they are implementing security and keep the good guys in mind as much as — or more than — they keep the bad guys in mind. Consider the following 5 strategies:

1. Understand traffic limits and consider upgrading for holidays: run site load tests to ensure your website can handle peak traffic, especially around times when they know a larger audience will access the website, such as during the holiday season or popular sales. Request an update from their network infrastructure team regarding DDoS attack mitigation capacity. The goal is to avoid failure.
2. Monitor for threats. If retailers don’t have a system set up to monitor for threats, they face a steep security disadvantage. Engage with an application security consultant who can also review the retailer’s threat posture and make recommendations for upgrades and updates.
3. Access and test the appropriate rules. It’s important not to implement too many rules, as this can result in false positives and the denial of legitimate traffic. The key to finding the balance between securing and over-securing a website is to repeatedly conduct tests. This will allow retailers to determine how many rules a website can run before it starts to negatively impact performance. Cloud-based web app firewall venors are often a tidy solution.
4. Update website rules. Retailers often skip this step simply because it’s time consuming, but by glossing over it, they put themselves and their customers at risk. Hackers are constantly utilizing resources to better their strategies, and in order to stay ahead of the game, retailers must as well.
5. Create a strong and secure in-store network. Network architecture and the type of connectivity available in store are to blame for slowdowns. Retailers need to ensure their network is fully optimized, which will allow the network to be both strong and secure.

Check the full article at Apparel.

3 Essential Traits of Retailers with Great End-User Experience

Within the Internet Retailer 500, a list of the largest U.S. online retailers in terms of annual revenue, the average desktop page load time on a cable or Fios connection is a whopping 8.6 seconds. That’s leagues away from the general web benchmark of 2.0 seconds, a page load time that begets great user experiences.These are the top 3 traits of retailers with great end-user experience:

1. Lighter apps – The top performing IR 500 apps are significantly lighter and less complex than the rest. Like all successful eCommerce sites, they provide a great experience, with forty percent fewer overall assets, and nearly half the overall weight (kb of data).
2. Mobile apps – the presence of customized “m.dot” sites tend to have smaller footprints than their desktop counterparts. And in the case of responsive sites, there are sometimes server-side optimizations that help to reign in the amount of content sent to mobile devices to improve performance. Overall, the top sites are lighter and less complex. 64% of the top quintile employ responsive design.
3. User experience technology – delivery is an important component of performance, and a large expense for most major retailers. The largest categories are Akamai, In-house, and NA (meaning the company either does not use a CDN or does not list it publicly). CDNs are important for scalability and maintaining performance for end users in all regions of the world.

Full article at: http://www.yottaa.com/blog/3-essential-traits-of-retailers-with-great-end-user-experience