Teridion The Internet. Lightning Fast. Rethinking Network Performance Technical White Paper July, 2015 www.teridion.com
Executive summary Online services face the growing dual challenge of supporting many users with ever-increasing bandwidth demands, while still providing a high-quality end-user experience. Cloud hosting providers are often faced with another challenge: customers need to upload large amounts of custom data to their servers. Thus, network throughput capacity is becoming more critical and the demand grows daily. The problem is that the Internet s routing and transport protocols, which were designed about 30 years ago, are not up to the task. And, there is no way of optimizing performance at the routing layer. This results in effective throughput loss. To address these needs, organizations often utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs emerged almost twenty years ago and are designed for the read-only web. They were originally designed to deliver faster load times by caching static content closer to the end user. Other partial solutions include WAN optimization, mainly focused on branch to HQ connectivity. Teridion offers a new and innovative solution to these challenges. The company s Global Cloud Network (GCN) improves the routing between end-users and the data centers by optimizing transport and routing, while still maintaining compatibility with all existing applications. Teridion s technology is cloud based. Thus, it does not require any installation, setup, code change, hardware or software. Any customer can start using Teridion within minutes. The GCN creates a private, overlay network for each customer, a Virtual Backbone Network (VBN), to deliver content much faster than the current Internet. In addition, Teridion automatically determines in real-time the best routing for each end-user, 24/7/365, according to their location and Internet connection type (WiFi, mobile, wired, etc.). In this way, Teridon can guarantee the customer is being served via the best possible 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. 1
Why End-Users Still Experience Poor Performance Cloud content providers have become increasingly personalized and interactive, and the volume of content passing between end-users and cloud providers is growing rapidly. Providing an acceptable user experience is critical for maintaining brand reputation, reducing churn, and developing new markets. On top of that, cloud hosting providers use-cases include end-user bi-directional content streaming; both upload and download, unlike websites that are focused on the downstream. And, many cloud host providers enable end-users data consumption via multiple platforms, including web-browser access, FTP, SFTP, FTPS, etc. While performance improvements are constantly developed both on client and server sides, the core networking protocols of Internet routing, including BGP and TCP, were developed many years ago and simply do not perform well in this new world. Still, we are forced to use the existing protocols despite their inadequacies. Let s take a closer look at these protocols: 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 cost-effective to the network provider and not 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. Common approach to improving poor end-user experience Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) 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 the inefficient routing penalty. 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 locations. Cloud based services including file hosting, do not fit well into such a scenario as the content is personal, private or shared with a small number of users connecting from different geographic locations. In addition, CDNs fit well with websites that require downstream. This is not the case with cloud hosting offerings that also focus on upstream end-user content. 2
Even CDNs that claim to overcome the routing problem and provide a better Internet routing based on their CDN network are obligated to specific geographical locations in which that particular CDN had pre-deployed its physical servers, their Point Of Presences (PoPs). This type of prerequisite (limitation) does not exist with Teridion s cloud based solution. The Teridion Solution Rethinking the problem Teridion addresses Internet congestion challenges in a fundamentally different way. The Teridion approach is very similar to an existing approach in the real world of delivery. We refer to this as The Courier algorithm. When a courier delivers a package, it does not look for the recipient's specific street address to make a decision where to go next. Instead, it searches for the best route between the sender s and recipient's ZIP codes. Only in the last mile does it look for the specific street address. The Teridion solution works in a similar way in that it searches for the best route to the end user and then routes according to the very best route. Teridion services are provided through Teridion Cloud Routers (TCRs), dedicated to a customer s Virtual Backbone Network(s). Currently, hundreds of TCRs run on multiple cloud providers platforms and provide worldwide and resilient coverage. Traffic from and to end-users is routed through the Teridion TCRs, and the company s proprietary algorithms and management system provides a real-time congestion-map of the Internet to make performance based routing decisions. This provides for both high-performance and availability between endusers and the provider. Relying on cloud providers also helps Teridion serve end-users from different locations around the globe with speed, without the need to buy hardware that would make the service more expensive. Figure 1. Teridion solution illustration. Without Teridion, traffic between cloud hosting servers and an end-user follows the gray lines. With Teridion, traffic is directed to the best entry point for each end-user, marked with dashed red lines. 3
Solution Highlights Guarantee the BEST network performance in real time In concept, the Teridion Management System (TMS) (Figure 2, below) can be described as a navigation solution for Internet traffic. Existing navigation solution offers the best route based on real-time reports, bypassing loaded links as soon as traffic starts accumulating. The TMS applies similar concepts for Teridion customer traffic. It determines the best route for each enduser, and dynamically adjusts the route in real time, guaranteeing that there is no better route for the given traffic. Figure 2. The Teridion Management System spans multiple cloud providers, and offers a customized view for each customer. While the BGP protocol makes decisions based on local visibility, the TMS has holistic 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 which is 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). 4
Accelerate any application protocol Teridion acceleration is based on routing and therefore is agnostic to application level protocols, allowing acceleration for non-common protocols such as websockets. Other acceleration providers, CDNs for example, are restricted to specific application level protocols, namely HTTP and HTTPS. Figure 3 below, depicts a 3rd party measurement comparison of a Teridion customer s endusers. Not only does the file load much faster, but response is more predictable. Without Teridion Not predictable response ms for download 2M file With Teridion 16x performance acceleration for file download Predictable response Figure 3. Teridion value for Response times 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 fully transparent from an enduser perspective. Fast deployment - no hardware prerequisite Teridion Servers run on multiple cloud providers with worldwide coverage. Building another Teridion Virtual Backbone Network is just a matter of minutes. This is also provides you with a competitive advantage. Scale up and down in real time The Teridion Virtual Backbone Network supports global business. It 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. 5
Keep control of all the data all the time CDNs best target the Internet as it was decades ago, which was 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 on an external source 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. This is translated to zero effort for any kind of maintenance from the Teridion customer end, reducing costs compared to using CDNs. Summary Cloud hosting providers unique use cases do not fit current acceleration solutions. The Teridion Virtual Backbone Network is a revolutionary technology that significantly improves web performance, allowing for improved user satisfaction and access to new markets which were not possible previously due to low network performance. The Teridion solution can be deployed rapidly, scales elastically, while keeping all business logic on the customer side. In addition, thanks to cloud providers and global traffic monitoring, Teridion can deploy at any point around the world in less than three minutes and improve enduser experience. Using Teridion, hosting providers gain peace-of- mind, releasing their content and user experience from the shackles of current Internet performance. 6