Welcome to the second installment in our “case for Cloud Acceleration,” explaining the specific benefits of using Acceleration to drive your website and applications to a new level! You may want to read back and check out The Importance of the Network.
As far as content delivery goes, the fundamental flaw hindering perfect delivery is distance. Logically, the farther away from the origin, the longer it takes to deliver the content. As a matter of fact, each 100 km of fiber optic distance = 1 ms in latency (one way — round-trip time would be double, of course).
What this means for Cloud Acceleration vendors is that it is crucial to constantly improve their network, and place nodes as close to the end users as possible, both at the beginning and ending of the content’s journey. Again, that is of the utmost importance: the data needs to enter the optimized/accelerated network as soon as possible, and then exit it as close to the end user as possible.
This is the second huge advantage of Cloud Acceleration… the network is directly peered with the eyeball networks where end users live. This completely bypasses “Internet backbone” providers — to use a common description (and something we could elaborate on in an off-topic post). These providers generally exchange traffic for free… which means that when traffic traverses the Internet, they have an obligation to pass it along. Because of this, there is little incentive to ensure performance standards and efficiency, and in some instances, legacy network architecture may introduce unnecessary packet loss, bottlenecks or other issues.
With many ISPs providing more and more bandwidth to their end users in order to keep up with the competition, they periodically run into saturation issues during peak usage at the point where network traffic drains to the Internet. I know this, because it is very obvious to me (and others I have spoken with) that during the evening, my home cable connection is painfully slower than it is at any other time. By delivering the content from the origin right into the end-user network, bypassing the Internet, Cloud Acceleration providers who understand the importance of the network, are in a better position to provide a higher quality of service.
What is the ultimate takeaway for the IT Manager? With Cloud Acceleration, content can feel like it is only 5 to 10ms away from the end user, making the experience feel much more like a LAN. Direct peering obviously carries huge ramifications for efficient delivery of content to your users, and please check back to The Fulcrum for the next installment of our series, on how TCP multiplexing can increase performance even further.
Jonathan Hoppe
