TERIDION CLOUD OPTIMIZED ROUTING AND THE SOFTWARE DEFINED INTERNET

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1 1 TERIDION CLOUD OPTIMIZED ROUTING AND THE SOFTWARE DEFINED INTERNET Technical White Paper April,

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary 1 Why End-Users Still Experience Poor Performance 2 Common Approaches 3 The Teridion Solution 3 Rethinking the Problem 3 Solution Highlights 4 Summary 6

3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Cloud-based services face the dual challenge of supporting many users and their dynamic content with ever-increasing bandwidth demands, while still providing a high-quality end-user experience. But given the state of Internet routing and peering, this is easier said than done. These service providers have no real visibility into the path between their user and his or her content or application, and where tools do exist, there is little or no ability to make changes. Because of this, the effective throughput of a 100 Mbps Internet connection may be 10 Mbps or less, and predictability for file sharing, conferencing, gaming, ad serving, and financial services suffers. Currently deployed fixes include Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), first deployed two decades ago for the read-only Internet, and requiring edge caches. Other approaches such as WAN Optimization and more recently, SD-WAN, apply to the HQ to branch scenario. A real solution, not a band-aid, requires that we rethink the problem and start with a clean slate. We re all moving moving to the cloud, and software is eating the world, as Marc Andressen said back in A hardware-centric CDN solution is not a good match for PaaS, SaaS, SDDCs, and SDN. We require a cloud-based approach to solve the dynamic content delivery problem, an approach that enables the Software-Defined Internet. Teridion s Global Cloud Network (GCN) offers a new and innovative solution to these challenges. The company s GCN improves the routing between end-users and the data centers by optimizing transport and routing, while still maintaining compatibility with all existing applications. It applies SDN principles to the global Internet, in the same way that others have implemented this paradigm in the campus or enterprise WAN. Teridion s technology is cloud based. Thus, it does not require any installation, setup, code change, hardware or software on the part of our customers, and on-boarding takes minutes. In addition, Teridion automatically determines in real-time the best routing for each enduser, 24/7/365, according to their location and Internet connection type (WiFi, mobile, wired, etc.). In this way, Teridon can guarantee the user is being served via the optimal route resulting in the best network performance, both upstream and downstream. Not only does Teridion find the best route, it also dynamically allocates resources and adapts to customer needs on the fly.

4 2 Teridion Cloud Optimized Routing April 2016 WHY END-USERS STILL EXPERIENCE POOR PERFORMANCE Cloud-based content has become increasingly personalized and interactive, and the volume passing between end-users and cloud providers is growing rapidly. it is bi-directional, and in many cases not web-based. Providing an acceptable user experience is critical for maintaining brand reputation, reducing churn, and developing new markets. While performance improvements are constantly developed both on the client and and within the data center, the core networking protocols of the Internet, including BGP and TCP, were developed many years ago and simply do not perform well in this new world. BGP, the core traffic routing protocol used by ISPs, was designed decades ago to ensure packets get to their destination regardless of current network conditions. At that time, commercial use of the Internet was not prevalent like it is today. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that a fair amount of BGP routing prioritization is based on commercial relationships between ISPs and on economic considerations. For example, a network may want to limit and/or route traffic based on which route is most costeffective to the network provider vs the fastest route. TCP was built for stability, not speed. TCP s aptly named slow-start feature is designed to negotiate communication speed between the browser and the server. In general, it takes three TCP exchanges to set up a TCP connection and four exchanges to tear one down. This is ideal for sending large files reliably, but not so great for sending a file at speed. TCP is also very unforgiving of packet loss, and as the latency increases, performance degrades significantly even at a packet loss of less than 1%.

5 3 COMMON APPROACHES TO IMPROVING POOR END-USER EXPERIENCE Content Delivery Networks are a solution many organizations adopt to ensure fast and reliable content delivery. One of the problems with CDNs is that they do not solve Internet routing inefficiencies. Although some CDNs claim to overcome this problem, they are relegated to specific geographical locations where the CDN operator has pre-deployed caches, their Point of Presences (PoPs). This architecture therefore matches a hardware-centric world, much less so with the cloud and SaaS. In addition, CDNs perform best when specific content is delivered to multiple end-users in a short period of time and in the same geographical location. Cloud based services do not fit well into such a scenario as the content is private or shared with a small number of users connecting from different geographic locations. CDNs also offer no solution for real-time content such as that generated via conferencing, distributed gaming, or any application or service dependent upon API calls. THE TERIDION SOLUTION - RETHINKING THE PROBLEM Teridion addresses Internet congestion challenges in a fundamentally different way. Our solution is very similar to an existing approach in the real world of delivery. When a courier delivers a package, he does not look for the recipient s specific street address to make a decision where to go next. Instead, he searches for the best route between the sender s and recipient s ZIP code. Only in the last mile does he look for the specific street address. The Teridion solution works in a similar way in that it searches for the optimal to the end user at any point in time, and then routes the data accordingly. The Teridion GCN consists of three components: Teridion Measurement Agents (TMAs) are deployed on virtual machines across multiple cloud operators, and probe outgoing connections for latency, loss, and throughput. The TMA is key to building a heat map of the Internet. Teridion Cloud Virtual Routers (TCRs), also deployed on virtual machines, route user data. Thousands of TCRs are dynamically created and deployed at any given instant across every major cloud operator. The Teridion Management System (TMS), a cloud-based resilient big-data platform, maintains a real-time view of global Internet congestion via TMAs and calculates where to place TCRs and paths connecting them. The ability to leverage multiple operators automatically is unique to the Teridion architecture.

6 4 Teridion Cloud Optimized Routing April 2016 Fig 1. Teridion solution illustration. Without Teridion, traffic between cloud hosting servers and an enduser follows the gray lines, subject to unpredictability. With Teridion, traffic is directed to the best entry point for each end-user, marked with green lines. SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS Guarantee the OPTIMAL network performance in real time The Teridion Management System (TMS) (Figure 2, below) can be described as a navigation solution for Internet traffic. Existing navigation solutions offer the best route based on real-time reports, bypassing loaded links as soon as traffic starts accumulating. Waze for roads is a good analogy. The TMS applies similar concepts for Teridion customer traffic. It determines the optimal route for each end-user, and dynamically adjusts this route in real time, guaranteeing that there is no better path for the given traffic. Fig 2. The Teridion Management System spans multiple cloud providers, and offers a customized view for each customer, while deploying TCRs and creating paths based on TMA data. Dotted lines are potential paths, while colored solid lines are actual paths traversed.

7 5 While the BGP protocol makes decisions based on local visibility, the TMS maintains global network performance visibility and can find the best routing between any two points (end-user and service origin location). Using TMS, full network visibility translates to: Higher throughput: important for file hosting when the end-user wants to upload or download large amounts of content. Teridion demonstrates improved throughput and time reduction as the content size becomes larger, very relevant for cloud hosting providers. Reduced round-trip-time (RTT) - increasingly important for applications in which the RTT multiplier is small, such as web service calls, AJAX-enabled applications and real-time applications (e.g., VoIP). Accelerate any application protocol Teridion acceleration is based on routing and therefore is agnostic to application level protocols, allowing acceleration for protocols such as WebSockets. Other acceleration providers, CDNs for example, are restricted to specific application level protocols, namely HTTP and HTTPS, and require inefficient application level gateways for other services. Figure 3 below depicts a 3rd party measurement comparison of a Teridion customer s end-users. Not only does the file load much faster, but response is more predictable. Fig 3. Teridion value for Response times

8 6 Teridion Cloud Optimized Routing April 2016 Easy integration - no software changes Teridion s most fundamental improvement is accomplished at the network layer as defined within the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. This means that Teridion acceleration is transparent to both Teridion customers and their end users. There is no need for software integration. Onboarding the Teridion network takes less than 5 minutes, and it is fully transparent from an end-user perspective. Fast deployment - no hardware pre-requisite Teridion TCRs run on multiple cloud providers with worldwide coverage. We can support a new customer in a matter of minutes. This also provides you with a competitive advantage. Scale up and down in real-time The Teridion GCN adapts to website loads in real-time and dynamically allocates the necessary resources. There is no need to prepare in advance to ensure customers are getting the best network experience, regardless of load. Keep control of all the data, all the time CDNs target the Internet as it was decades ago, focused on static content. As a result, CDNs struggle to accelerate dynamic content or when the data changes frequently and caching becomes less relevant. Teridion accelerates all content, regardless of its characteristics, including static, dynamic, cached and uncached. In addition, storing data independent of the origin forces managing it on a regular basis. With Teridion, data is stored only on the organization s servers so it needs to be managed only once and in a single location. It is therefore more secure, critical for certain verticlals. SUMMARY Cloud-based application providers create unique use cases that do not fit current acceleration solutions. The Teridion Global Cloud Network is a revolutionary service offering that significantly improves performance, allowing for improved user satisfaction and access to new markets which were not possible previously due to low network performance. And, application developers may now build to their vision as opposed to global Internet limitations. The solution can be deployed rapidly, and scales elastically. In addition, thanks to cloud providers and global traffic monitoring, Teridion can deploy at any point around the world in a matter of minutes. Using Teridion, SaaS companies gain peace-of- mind, releasing their content and user experience from the shackles of current Internet performance. We deliver on the promise of the Software- Defined Internet.