Recently in Cloud Computing Category

In the words of the great Peter Drucker "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it". This is especially true when it comes to managing performance in the Cloud. Most organizations rely on the standard performance monitor tooling that is offered by their Cloud Provider, which only provides basic insights into the health of the infrastructure within the data center. But what about what's happening outside the data center? Do you have complete end-to-end visibility into all your actual users and the performance they are experiencing? And then how do you optimize the experience for your end-users?

Or is it?! Do you feel burnt out on hearing from vendors who don't have any new or interesting perspectives to share on the seemingly overplayed topic of Cloud? As a former IT Manager myself, I feel you. That's why I sought out an expert, Jason Fuller, to share his insights and best practices for designing cloud architectures. I wanted to get an unbiased perspective from a guy who has the battle scars to show for his many ups-and-downs as an IT executive managing mission critical cloud environments for large global enterprises.

Akamai's next "Girls Who Code" summer immersion program is still a couple of months away, but in the meantime I wanted to tell you about our involvement with another fantastic organization inspiring girls to pursue tech careers - the Girl Scouts.

Are you delivering or thinking of delivering your web presence or application through a CDN? The many reasons to do so are well documented. Your site will be faster, more reliable, and you will require less data centre bandwidth and infrastructure. All this leads to a better user experience, which affects profitability, customer retention, conversation rates, etc. But this post isn't about why you should use a CDN. We're going to examine why you should hide your hosting presence (the Origin as we refer to it) from the Internet and how to do it.

Your web application by default is accessible to the entire planet. This exposure can open your site up to unnecessary risk. Akamai's Request Control Cloudlet can quickly allow or deny access to website content based on the IP or Geography associated with an inbound request. For example, you may deny access to users in embargoed countries or allow it only to a specific region where your users live.  Manage the cloudlet via easy-to-manage whitelist and blacklists based on the IP address or geographic location associated with the inbound request. Activate the cloudlet policies in seconds by using the dedicated user interface.

In my last articles I introduced the idea of how simple is the concept of a WAF (although implementing a reliable WAF system is not that simple), what are false positives and false negatives and the best approach to trade-off between them, what is the impact of wide visibility when it comes to build a WAF, the importance of having a solid team of experts backing up a WAF solution, and how does scale affect to WAF performance (and ultimately to WAF deployment).

Let's move on with our analysis of the ideal WAF requirements. Scale is, without a doubt, one of the most important requirements of an effective WAF. Scale has to be considered from two perspectives: under standard traffic conditions and under unusually high levels of traffic. Let's look at each one.

In my previous blog, I showed how seriously the performance of your website can be affected by your CDN, even though many don't include it in their monitoring strategy. To enable you to improve your performance tuning and rapid troubleshooting, you must monitor your CDN along with the rest of your systems and do so effectively. In this blog I'll show you how to do just that.

First time I jumped into a plane I was around 10 or 12 years old. The crew, moved by my innocent face and my dazzle, gave me a great gift: they allowed me to enter into the cabin where the pilot was commanding the flight. This is what I saw:

We are happy to announce that Deutsche Telekom has selected Akamai Cloud Networking to enhance its IP-VPN portfolio. The new IP-VPN offering from Deutsche Telekom will utilize Akamai Cloud Networking Internet Transport Optimization capabilities to bolster the reliability and performance of enterprises' Internet IP-VPN traffic.