The availability, performance and reach of every web application starts and ends with network connectivity.
Today data centric business applications must take into consideration not only the direct connectivity of the web application, but also the network connectivity and end-user.
Caching
Network caching for web application hosting involves using high performance object storage local to the application for frequently accessed content. For remote or user edge caching, see content delivery networks.
Basic web application caching usually involves proxying all application traffic through a gateway such as nginx and varnish, caching all static requests to memory or fast primary storage.
Advanced web application caching usually involves explicitly configuring your applications to make use of local object caching services such as redis or memcached.
Our experience allows us to take a whole-application approach to its architecture and resultant performance, caching being just one small part of any overall solution.
Content Delivery
Content delivery for web application hosting is usually involves third party services keeping copies of your application data close to the end-user which offers increased performance, scaling and cost efficiency.
Traditional CDN allows you to store static web assets on a third party server, those assets are then duplicated across the CDN provider’s global network of servers. User requests for dynamic content still hit your web application first, but static content is referenced to the CDN and is delivered from a node local to the end-user.
Advanced or modern CDN is typically coupled with the proxying of traffic, with the proxy being configured to cache and deliver the static parts of your web application and the CDN proxy communicates with your web application on behalf of the user for the dynamic content.
Streaming CDN for live or near-live audio and video are particularly focused on the real-time duplication and re-broadcasting of streaming media and often sourced separately to static CDN.
The choice of CDN is dependent on the type of content to be delivered, the concurrency and quality of streaming or overall volume of data required and reach required. While most CDN have excellent global reach, for countries such as China region specific CDN may be considered.
Load Balancing
Web application load balancing is the direction or balancing of traffic across multiple servers or services for the purposes of scaling an application for availability, scaling, performance and efficiency.
Traditional DNS load balancing can be as simple as defining multiple public server addresses for your traffic pointing to different infrastructures, where as more advanced DNS load balancing includes providing different public server addresses depending on the availability or end-users IP locality so directing them to available and/or local infrastructure.
Traditional web application load balancing involves directing different end-users to multiple horizontally scaled backend web servers, using either round-robin (random selection) or sticky-session (hashed end-user IP or cookie ID selection) routing methods.
Advanced web application load balancing combines all elements of caching, content delivery, web application firewalling, DNS load balancing and more.
Cloud Networks
Cloud networks both public (such as AWS, Azure and GCE) and private (such as Pipe Ten and customers), include software defined/virtual networking and virtualised network services.
Such virtualised network services can include bandwidth, firewalling, IP addressing, routing, load balancing, caching, optimisation, SSL, VPN and more.
The flexibility of software defined networking combined with virtualisation delivers a changeable, scalable and cost efficient network solution.
Our Cloud and Physical networking are frequently combined to deliver Hybrid networks.
Physical Networks
Local physical networking refers to:
- Connectivity between Pipe Ten compute/storage/network services and the switches within Pipe Ten’s physical data centre racks.
- Public connectivity between switches within Pipe Ten’s data centre racks and the wider Internet.
- Interconnection between different Pipe Ten data centre environments.
- Connection to third party networks for bespoke needs.
We are able to deploy and manage physical networks for any purpose including specialist networks such as Vocalink for Faster Payments and other secure Bank of England services.
Our Cloud and Physical networking are frequently combined to deliver Hybrid networks.
Hybrid Networks
Our Cloud and Physical networking are frequently combined to deliver Hybrid networks.
Hybrid networks involve the interconnection of compute/storage/network services across different services, infrastructures, providers and locations.
Examples of hybrid physical <> cloud networks include:
- GCP Interconnect between physical and cloud environments allowing for low cost and high speed exchange of data for BCP/DR purposes without excessive egress cost.
- AWS Direct Connect for low latency access between AWS public cloud application to a private cloud API endpoint.
- Azure ExpressRoute for guaranteed latency between private cloud web service and public cloud SQL service.
Hybrid networks are typically:
- Lower latency
- Guaranteed throughput
- Improved security
- SLA backed
- Cost efficient
Classification: Public
Last saved: 2024/03/18 at 13:09 by Carl