section.io Website Performance and Security Blog

We recently had a client approach us who was struggling with long tails in latency times with their previous CDN provider. They had a small portion of customers who were experiencing up to 30 second load times, which in their terms was “completely unacceptable”. For this particular client, reduction in overall average latency was important, but more important to them was getting the outliers under control.

At Section, we’re primarily focused on providing value for developers on the programming side of edge compute, but the scalability of our platform is heavily dependent on the edge infrastructure that we utilize. In order to meet the demand for increasingly vast volumes of requests that pass through our platform, we’re constantly looking for ways to optimize our infrastructure to continue to support highly performant systems.

As we look ahead to the future of edge computing, there are many use cases that are driving demand. However, one area that we are especially interested in is online gaming, where we believe that our platform has the opportunity to provide transformative value for game developers.

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a way of monitoring performance through the capture and analysis of each transaction by the user of a website or application. By measuring your website or app performance in this way, you can see how your site is accessed from different browsers, devices, and connection speeds. This provides you with quantifiable metrics to benchmark and improve upon, such as load time and transaction path.

Among the primary customers that we serve at Section are SaaS (Software as a Service) companies that license and deliver software on a subscription basis from a central hosting platform. SaaS has become a popular delivery model for many business segments - from payroll processing to HR management, along with all types of other enterprise applications. The Section platform is a very compatible solution for SaaS companies for three key reasons.

Our team was in attendance at the recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2018. The agenda was packed with insights across 16 different areas of tech - from Application Modernization to Work, People & Culture. One of the highlights of the annual event is hearing what the Gartner experts have identified as the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for the coming year. This influential list highlights the key “changing or not yet widely recognized trends that will impact and transform industries through 2023”. Not surprisingly, this year’s list includes the Edge.

Mixed content takes place whenever initial HTML is loaded over a secure HTTPS connection while other resources (e.g. scripts, images, videos) are loaded over an unsecure HTTP connection. Due to the fact that the initial request was secure over HTTPS, and both HTTP and HTTPS need to be loaded to display the same page, this is deemed mixed content.

The ‘edge’ is dominating many conversations across the technology landscape today. 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside of centralized cloud data centers and relocated to the edge by 2022, according to Gartner. However, beyond its potential for disrupting traditional cloud infrastructure, what does edge computing tactically mean for developers who are responsible for the day-in-day-out management of increasingly distributed web application architecture?

To keep pace with technology, engineers must be able to conduct quick deployments in a safe, reliable and repeatable way. DevOps and continuous delivery (CD) help to support a more responsive and flexible, quicker time-to-market across the software delivery cycle; an increasingly important asset in a market in which IT departments are squeezed to achieve a quicker pace of innovation.

The two most important demands on any online service provider are availability and resiliency. It takes a server a certain amount of time to respond to any given request, depending on its current capacity. If during this process, a single component fails or the server is overwhelmed by requests, both the user and the business will suffer. Load balancing aims to solve this issue by sharing workloads across multiple components rather than using a single server, thereby ensuring consistently fast website performance at any scale.