Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

On Tuesday, June 7, internet users in numerous countries from East Africa to the Middle East to South Asia experienced an hours-long degradation in service due to an outage at one of the internet’s most critical chokepoints: Egypt. Beginning at approximately 12:25 UTC, multiple submarine cables connecting Europe and Asia experienced outages lasting over four hours. As I show below, the impacts were visible in various types of internet measurement data to the affected countries.

Images are a constant source of pain when developing websites. There are many formats and resolutions a developer must consider in order to maximize web performance. You’ll often end up with a cartesian explosion of the same image in different sizes and formats to support different scenarios. For example, you don’t want to send a high res image meant for high DPI screens to a low DPI screen - you’d be wasting bandwidth and burning time. Using the right file format is equally important.

I often hear from customers who complain about how “classic” performance testing (i.e., end-to-end testing with high volume of virtual users) of their applications before release slows down the cycle time by several weeks. In addition, the testing significantly consumes both people and infrastructure (hardware and software license) resources.

Among all the inconveniences endemic to living in the 21st century, there are few as common as a faulty internet connection. Most everyone with internet access is familiar with the experience but perhaps less so with the reason why. There are several, but chief among them is packet loss. In this article, we’ll explore what packet loss is and show you some of the first steps to conducting a packet loss test. But first, let’s briefly review what a packet is.

Many users are familiar with the concept of network ping. Especially those who like online games. If you are having connection problems, the most reliable way to check it is to use the "ping" command. But not everyone can answer what a ping really is. In simple words, it is a measure of the time it takes for a network request to get from user to server and back.

When transferring data between systems, it's extremely important to preserve integrity and confidentiality. There are protocols and procedures to do so. One of them is the Secure Copy Protocol (SCP); which is a method designed to securely pass on digital information. The SCP protocol helps transferring files from a local to a remote host or between two remote hosts.

IP Blacklists contain ranges of or individual IP addresses ‌you want to block. A blacklist can be used in combination with firewalls, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and other traffic filtering tools. With the recent developments in cyber security, organizations are increasingly relying on IP blacklisting to protect their networks.

Preloads are a powerful optimization technique that can make significant improvements to crucial performance metrics such as Core Web Vitals. I have written on prefetching a DNS lookup or even preconnecting to a domain. Preloading is a much more powerful extension of these concepts because it enables you to download entire resources in advance. In this article, let’s look at.

SD-WAN is software to help manage the WAN. It makes the management and operation of a WAN by decoupling the networking hardware from its control mechanism and making it more straightforward. SD-WAN is a transformative technology used to simplify IT infrastructure management through a virtual WAN architecture that securely connects users to their applications. To understand SD-WAN, we should start with the traditional WAN.