An hour-long outage this Tuesday ground the Internet to a halt after popular Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider, Fastly, experienced a glitch that downed Reddit, Spotify, HBO Max, Shopify, Stripe and the BBC, to name just a few of properties affected.
The error brought down everything from streamers to fintech to news outlets, but fortunately only lasted about an hour, with Fastly calling the issue a "global CDN disruption," indicating that it wasn't relegated to issues at a single data center.
While this outage was frustrating for users who logged on Tuesday morning only to be greeted by a 503 error, it likely had many non-IT folks curious about CDNs and the larger Internet Infrastructure delivering their apps, sites and workflows (at least for an hour). While IT teams understand CDNs and their role in the business-critical apps employees consume, this type of outage highlights the need for end-to-end visibility.
For starters, CDNs are a critical component of the larger Internet. CDN companies operate servers around the globe that connect to improve performance and availability of web services by caching some data as close to the end user as possible. With apps now critically linked to business tasks and productivity, the most popular apps use CDN technology to provide a consistently good experience for all users. For instance, the media content you consume (ie. your New York Times front page) may be cached at a CDN server near you so that it doesn't have to be retrieved from a far-flung server every time you load a web page.
So while a page could take hundreds of milliseconds to load when it's being retrieved from a server on the other side of the world, a CDN can usually start sending the content of a page in less than 25 milliseconds when it's already been cached. This, in part, is how apps have continued to grow more complex without impacting the responsiveness for the end user.
Another way to understand CDNs is in relation to edge computing: in many enterprise contexts, CDNs are the WAN edge.
To help avoid congestion at key points in the network, teams can employ subnets (or VLANs) to help segment traffic at key locations, which can more intelligently (and predictably) route traffic to reduce the load on the larger network. In a similar fashion, enterprises can deploy CDNs that serve external requests directly without impacting the performance of the larger WAN.
So the nutshell-take here is that despite being resilient, the Internet is very much built on optimizing performance for the task at hand, with servers and data centers across the world working together to deliver content to users. While many enterprises strive to go "internet-first" in an attempt to offload the amount of physical hardware their IT teams manage directly, these teams still need visibility into the environments that help route and deliver traffic across the enterprise footprint to ensure end-user experience stays consistent. When issues like this arise, understanding the scope of the outage from an enterprise perspective allows IT teams to identify the impact to their users and business.
Gaining this visibility requires a comprehensive monitoring tool that can take a granular look at the network while at the same time putting minimal impact on network capacity itself.
The Latest
App sprawl has been a concern for technologists for some time, but it has never presented such a challenge as now. As organizations move to implement generative AI into their applications, it's only going to become more complex ... Observability is a necessary component for understanding the vast amounts of complex data within AI-infused applications, and it must be the centerpiece of an app- and data-centric strategy to truly manage app sprawl ...
Fundamentally, investments in digital transformation — often an amorphous budget category for enterprises — have not yielded their anticipated productivity and value ... In the wake of the tsunami of money thrown at digital transformation, most businesses don't actually know what technology they've acquired, or the extent of it, and how it's being used, which is directly tied to how people do their jobs. Now, AI transformation represents the biggest change management challenge organizations will face in the next one to two years ...
As businesses focus more and more on uncovering new ways to unlock the value of their data, generative AI (GenAI) is presenting some new opportunities to do so, particularly when it comes to data management and how organizations collect, process, analyze, and derive insights from their assets. In the near future, I expect to see six key ways in which GenAI will reshape our current data management landscape ...
The rise of AI is ushering in a new disrupt-or-die era. "Data-ready enterprises that connect and unify broad structured and unstructured data sets into an intelligent data infrastructure are best positioned to win in the age of AI ...
A majority (61%) of organizations are forced to evolve or rethink their data and analytics (D&A) operating model because of the impact of disruptive artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, according to a new Gartner survey ...
The power of AI, and the increasing importance of GenAI are changing the way people work, teams collaborate, and processes operate ... Gartner identified the top data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2024 that are driving the emergence of a wide range of challenges, including organizational and human issues ...
IT and the business are disconnected. Ask the business what IT does and you might hear "they implement infrastructure, write software, and migrate things to cloud," and for some that might be the extent of their knowledge of IT. Similarly, IT might know that the business "markets and sells and develops product," but they may not know what those functions entail beyond the unit they serve the most ...
Cloud spending continues to soar. Globally, cloud users spent a mind-boggling $563.6 billion last year on public cloud services, and there's no sign of a slowdown ... CloudZero's State of Cloud Cost Report 2024 found that organizations are still struggling to gain control over their cloud costs and that a lack of visibility is having a significant impact. Among the key findings of the report ...
The use of hybrid multicloud models is forecasted to double over the next one to three years as IT decision makers are facing new pressures to modernize IT infrastructures because of drivers like AI, security, and sustainability, according to the Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report from Nutanix ...
Over the last 20 years Digital Employee Experience has become a necessity for companies committed to digital transformation and improving IT experiences. In fact, by 2025, more than 50% of IT organizations will use digital employee experience to prioritize and measure digital initiative success ...
