Hybrid cloud

The New Normal

CEDEXIS EBOOK
Hybrid cloud
The New Normal I Introduction
oday's infrastructure doesn't look like yesterday's.
Where once Operations teams built extensive,
high-availability data centers, today they extend their
capabilities with the elastic storage, compute, and deli-
very capacity of public cloud services.
But public cloud infrastructure comes at a cost.
Not only must Ops teams manage the chaos of depart-
ments throughout the organization grabbing new cloud
capacity at will, they must somehow ensure that they
balance delivering excellent experience to each and
every end user with cost structures that can make or
break the profit/loss equation of the whole business.
CEDEXIS EBOOK - OCTOBER 2017
In this Ebook, we look at some of the considerations
Ops - and especially the newly-minted DevOps - teams
must keep in mind as they integrate public cloud ser-
vices into their hybrid cloud environments.
From the serious - (identifying the hidden risks lurking in
hybrid infrastructures), to the quirky (a lighthearted look
at how to make the next emergency more entertaining),
this collection of perspectives provides a window into
the challenging world of the hybrid cloud operation.
Hybrid cloud is the new normal - but that doesn't mean
it's all worked out just yet.
02
Hybrid cloud
The New Normal I Table of contents

The problem lurking Self-sourced data won’t get you

inside your hybrid IT strategy 05 where you want to go 22

SaaS Metrics that beat

comes at you fast 09 Murphy’s law 26

10 ways to make Cloud-first + DevOps-first

outage mitigation fun 14 = 81% competitive advantage 30

Cloud capabilities turn developers Optimizing for resources

into operational experts 18 and consumers alike 33

CEDEXIS EBOOK - OCTOBER 2017 03

Hybrid cloud
The New Normal I The authors
Charles Araujo is the accidental
author of the best selling book,
The Quantum Age of IT: Why
Everything You Know About IT is
About to Change. He is a regular
contributor to both CIO Insight
Magazine and InformationWeek
and has been quoted in or publi-
shed in magazines and websites
including Time, CIO, CIO & Leader,
IT Business Edge, TechRepublic,
Computerworld, USA Today and
Forbes. He currently also serves as
Principal Analyst for
Intellyx.
CEDEXIS EBOOK - OCTOBER 2017
Andrew Marshall has driven pro-
duct marketing, launch, and GTM
strategy for companies like
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft,
and New Relic. His passion for new
and disruptive SaaS-based tools led
him to Cedexis, where he is the
Director of Product Marketing.
He is a contributor to APM Digest,
DevOps Digest, DevOps.com, and
other technology publications.
Andrew lives, works, and plays in
the Silicon Forrest, but he prefers
to just call it Portland.
Simon Jones is a Silicon Valley
veteran, who has spent the last two
decades building, evangelizing, and
implementing technology solutions
that are often sufficiently advanced
that they are virtually indistingui-
shable from magic.
Currently Evangelist and head of
marketing for Cedexis, he resides at
the heart of the San Francisco Bay
Area, and spend every day
endeavoring to explain compli-
cated things in simple ways.
04

The problem lurking
inside your hybrid IT strategy
Charles Araujo
BrainBlog, August 30, 2017
HYBRID CLOUD - THE NEW NORMAL
It is tempting to dismiss
something that you see as
trendy. While it implies pro-
gressiveness and
forward-thinking and im-
parts a certain cachet on
the trendsetter, observers
often see those things
deemed trendy as mere
fads. Enterprise executives
are just as subject to the
allure of the latest trend —
and today’s object of fasci-
nation is Hybrid IT.
05
Unlike many trends that are, in fact, nothing but fads, Will the real hybrid IT please stand up
Hybrid IT is the real deal. It represents the natural evolution
and rationalization of a number of trends and movements The reason that many enterprise leaders do not yet unders-

that have consumed enterprise IT for the last decade. tand the problems they may soon face in routing traffi-
cacross their Hybrid IT architectures is that many of them

More importantly, it embodies a movement away from the do not yet fully understand the real nature of a Hybrid IT

initial period of exploration and experimentation to a time strategy.

in which organizations embrace emerging technologies at

scale and begin the arduous task of rationalizing and inte- As I wrote recently, we define Hybrid IT as “a management

grating their legacy technology investments with the approach in which organizations create a workload-centric

modern technologies and strategies necessary to thrive in and value-driven integrated technology stack that may

the digital era. include legacy infrastructure, web-scale architectures,

private cloud implementations along with public cloud

As enterprise executives embrace the ideas behind Hybrid platforms ranging from Infrastructure-as-a-Service to Sof-

IT, they must also face the fact that there is a significant tware-as-a-Service.”

problem lurking within their evolving strategies: the inability

to effectively, predictively and cost-optimally distribute The problem is that many enterprise organizations are

traffic across their application and rich media content. using the Hybrid IT trend as a crutch, skipping over the
workload-centric and value-driven parts and taking the

It’s a problem that they must solve to realize their Hybrid IT concept to mean that they can pick-and-choose technolo-

ambitions. gies indiscriminately. With that approach, traffic is less of a

challenge as they have done nothing more than bolt-to-
gether a mishmash of technology pieces and parts.

As organizations embrace the real meaning of a Hybrid IT

strategy, however, and, as a result, reimagine their architec-

THE PROBLEM LURKING INSIDE YOUR HYBRID IT STRATEGY 06

ture from a workload and business-value perspective, they applications and content whenever and wherever cus-
will find that traffic flows change. And as they change, the tomers demand it. As organizations continue to shift away
traffic distribution problem lurking in the shadows will rear from systems-drive architectures and embrace worklo-
its ugly head. ad-centricity, the challenge of managing and allocating
traffic will become increasingly critical to enhancing the
customer experience and protecting competitive value for
Traffic distribution in a hybrid world the organization. Those organizations that can overcome
this challenge will reap the rewards.
In traditional architectures, traffic patterns are relatively
predictable and manageable. In cloud deployments, cloud
providers largely handle the management of traffic.
The Intellyx take
Hybrid IT architectures, with their workload-centricity,
however, introduce a complexity that most enterprise
organizations are not yet prepared to handle. As organiza-
tions dynamically allocate application workloads and sup-
porting content between on-premises infrastructure and
one or more cloud environments, traffic management
becomes nearly impossible using traditional traffic optimi-
zation approaches.

Moreover, rapidly changing customer expectations and

what we at Intellyx call the primacy of the customer, mean
that enterprise organizations are no longer in control of Workload-centricity and the adoption of authentic Hybrid IT
traffic distribution at all — at least not in the traditional strategies, like everything related to digital transformation, will
sense. Instead, organizations must be capable of delivering require fundamental shifts in both culture and technology.

THE PROBLEM LURKING INSIDE YOUR HYBRID IT STRATEGY 07

Organizations must first change the way they think about
how they deploy applications and content across their
infrastructure and the implications of traffic patterns on the
customer experience. As they do so, they must also re-eva-
luate the technologies that they rely on to manage the
delivery of those applications and content.

This re-evaluation will lead enterprise leaders to explore

emerging technology companies, such as Cedexis, that
deliver both visibility and software-defined application
delivery capabilities. The ability of such tools to dynamically
and automatically route traffic based on business logic and
optimization rules will be critical to organizations seeking to
adopt Hybrid IT strategies.

Adopting a Hybrid IT strategy, however, is not an end unto

itself. As we examine in the webinar, This is How to Make
Hybrid IT Web-Scale, the ultimate goal of such a strategy is
to enable organizations to embrace the web-scale ethos
needed to compete in the future — including the dynamic
management of traffic — while grappling with the architec-
tural reality of the modern enterprise.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Cedexis is an Intellyx client. Intellyx retains full editorial
control over the content of this paper.

THE PROBLEM LURKING INSIDE YOUR HYBRID IT STRATEGY 08

SaaS comes at you fast
These days, it seems only a software-defined
application delivery platform can keep up with
the needs of multi-cloud and dynamic
infrastructure.

Andrew Marshall
DZone / Cloud Zone, August 31, 2017

HYBRID CLOUD - THE NEW NORMAL 09

It’s an exciting time to be software! Chances are you were
brought into the world through continuous delivery,
making a loving team of DevOps parents very proud… and
very, very happy.
Your potential is unlimited! The only thing that could pos-
sibly prevent you from growing up to fulfill your SaaS desti-
ny is a poor application delivery strategy.
Your grandfather was a monolithic
app
In a simpler time, maybe five or six years ago, applications
were monolithic in nature, making delivery a straight
forward process. That’s no longer the case, as today’s
modern apps are distributed and often powered by micro-
services like containers or cloud services.
DevOps teams these days need to make sure every com-
ponent of the application is performing as expected.
But that’s just the start, as they also must make sure the
connective tissue of these distributed apps isn't underper-
forming, which could create a terrible end-user experience.
Software-defined application delivery allows you to decide
exactly how you want your application to be experienced
SAAS COMES AT YOU FAST
by the end user, and easily write contingency-based code
to implement those rules.
Changes to your application architecture aren’t a major
concern since your rules can accommodate both planned
and unexpected changes.
Your generation is right at home on
heterogeneous infrastructure
Like applications, modern infrastructure has also changed
significantly in the last several years. No longer are you
using a single data center, or perhaps a data center and
one CDN to make sure your app gets to your customers.
Multi-CDN infrastructures allow you to re-route app traffic
when performance is an issue.
Multi-cloud environments are becoming more and more
prevalent as enterprises want to avoid public cloud vendor
lock-in and gain more control over their critical shared
infrastructure.
And of course, the data center you purchased a few years
ago isn’t just gathering dust…you paid for it, so you’re using
it. The net result is a heterogeneous set of infrastructures
being used to deliver you to customers.
10
Kids today with their dynamic in-
frastructure
Even if your infrastructure is fully built out and provisioned,
it is, by the nature of the cloud, constantly changing as
instances are both spun-up and de-provisioned.
Often, and for many reasons, this happens without you
explicitly knowing about it. Software-defined application
delivery helps you optimize your infrastructure in its current
state, again using the business rules you decide on.
This has the additional benefit of giving you a better idea of
how to plan for cloud capacity and avoid overpaying since
you can automate delivery based on your reserved
instances and fully utilize the capacity you paid for.
Your Software-defined application delivery also accounts
for changes in cloud provider pricing and specific geogra-
phic needs, keeping the end of month bill surprises to a
minimum.
Moving sucks
There aren’t any shortcuts when it comes to migrating appli-
cations to the cloud. The first step in cloud migration needs
to be making sure your application can be delivered to your
worldwide customers before, during, and after the migration.
SAAS COMES AT YOU FAST
Do you really want to do that manually, while in the middle
of a migration? Software-defined application delivery
systems make sure your app reaches customers at all
times.
Learn to speak a multi-cloud foreign
language
There are plenty of reasons to shift to a multi-cloud
infrastructure plan: avoiding cloud lock-in, protection
against massive cloud outages, leveraging certain ven-
dor-specific services or offerings, and good old fashion
Cloud SLA negotiation leverage.
But once you’ve made the decision to add a second cloud
vendor to your infrastructure, it’s time to start thinking
about how to ensure your app delivery is optimized for
multi-cloud environments. Having your Ops team do so
manually with each vendor isn’t likely to be a popular strate-
gy. The only way to manage delivery is with a software-de-
fined abstraction layer on top of both clouds.
Your Software-defined application delivery speaks both
cloud “languages”, and does all the translating for you,
automatically.
11
Your grandfather’s application delive-
ry controllers can’t keep up
Remember the monolithic app? Its best friend was the
Application Delivery Controller (ADC), also built for a diffe-
rent age. Often built into a blinking hardware box in a data
center, old guard ADCs had several drawbacks.
They required a significant upfront expense, as opposed
today’s cloud pay as you go model. Monitoring was done
with synthetic testing only, not the combination of real-user
and synthetic monitoring many software-defined applica-
tion delivery solutions provide today.
Most importantly, ADC solutions were not as easily confi-
gurable and customizable as the robust software-defined
application delivery, making them unusable with today’s
modern application architecture.
Get in a routine
As more and more concerns (security, DevOps, new tech-
nologies, etc.) are added to the Ops team’s list of things to
worry about, the need for process automation becomes
paramount.
SAAS COMES AT YOU FAST
Software-defined application delivery automation has the
very practical effect of removing many common delivery
issues, such as micro-outages, service degradations, and
the occasional (and highly newsworthy) public cloud
outage from the “worry” list. Your uptime and customer
experience should all be ensured by a set of routing rules
you determine ahead of time. You can’t put a price on
peace of mind, or not getting a million “OUR APP IS
DOWN!!!!!” emails.
SaaS comes at you fast
Outages and cloud service degradation happens, so you
need a plan in place for when they do. Many companies
choose to utilize multiple cloud providers to ensure their
application is always available to worldwide customers,
even during an outage.
Taking control over changes in public cloud service offe-
rings, pricing models, and SLAs is another powerful motiva-
tor for Ops teams to move to a multi-cloud architecture.
Software-defined application delivery allows you to
seamlessly and automatically deliver applications over
multiple clouds and/or CDNs, factoring in real-time availa-
bility, costs structures, and application performance.
12
There's no fate but what we make
for ourselves
There’s no way you can keep up with constantly changing
applications, the infrastructure they’re built on, and inevi-
table network issues with manual processes.
Software-defined application delivery allows you to imple-
ment the business rules that you know are important to the
app delivery process, and do so instantly and automatically
via customizable code.

End user experience, network latency, unplanned cloud

provisioning or CDN bursting, and other considerations can
all be factored in as your needs change.
The multiple application delivery fail-safe layers will keep
you insulated from the outages that need to be mitigated
during your Game of Thrones viewing.

SAAS COMES AT YOU FAST 13


10 ways to make
outage mitigation fun
Andrew Marshall
DevOps.com, August 25, 2017
HYBRID CLOUD - THE NEW NORMAL
It’s 3:47 a.m. You and the
rest of the Ops team have
been summoned from
your peaceful slumber to
mitigate an application de-
livery outage.
As you catch up on the
frantic emails, Slack chats
and text messages from
everyone on your interna-
tional sales team (Every.
Single. One.), your mind
races as you switch to pro-
blem-solving mode.
It’s time to start thinking
about how to make this
mitigation FUN!
14
1.
Gently remind everyone that the SaaS-delivered automated
application delivery strategy you proposed would have
prevented this. No need to rub it in, but … if you had turned
on a software-defined application delivery platform for your
hybrid infrastructure, you’d all be sound asleep right now.
Automated real-time delivery decisions and failover would
be nice, right? Just sayin’.
2.
Drop a generationally divisive Giphy in the emergency Slack
channel. Your coworkers’ opinions on gaming consoles,
Spiderman movies and music are different than yours!
The perfect animated GIF will remind them of your erudite
tastes, while you have their attention.
Extra credit if you can work in some low-key shade about
not listening to your equally sophisticated opinions on
optimized outage mitigation.
3.
Hold an impromptu cloud health dashboard page customi-
zation contest. Oh hey, look at that! Your cloud provider’s
health dashboard page says everything is fine … because it’s
powered by the services that went down. Help your team
10 WAYS TO MAKE OUTAGE MITIGATION FUN
vent their creative energy (and frustration) with some fun
customized MS Paint updates to the offending page.
Bonus points for art that reminds everyone of the value of a
multi-cloud strategy powered by a programmable applica-
tion delivery platform.
4.
Use health metrics to cure ills instead of just conducting
another really good post-mortem. Tired of “learning
lessons” from these emergency room drills?
You depend on NGINX for your LLB, but don’t have a way
to use those LLB health metrics and data to automate
global delivery. Disjointed delivery intelligence means you
don’t know how your apps will land with users.
You need an end-user-centric approach to app delivery that
automates the best delivery path and ensures failover is in
place at all times.
Micro-outages often fly under your passive monitoring
radar, but that doesn’t mean your users don’t notice them.
An active, integrated app delivery approach re-routes auto-
matically before you lose business.
Post-mortems are fun … but so is making sure your apps
survive the last mile. Arguably more so?
15
5.
Open (and then close) some tickets for the sales team.
“Sales needs to sell more stuff.” You’ll feel better.
6.
Build a countdown clock for when you can finally replace
your old ADC hardware. Sure, your Mode1 ADC hardware
was a sunk cost so you’re stuck with them for a while.
But you’re one unnecessary emergency closer to having a
fully software-defined application delivery platform for your
hybrid cloud. And now you’re even closer. And closer …
Tick. Tock.
10 WAYS TO MAKE OUTAGE MITIGATION FUN
7.
Leverage real user measurements (RUM) to foresee and fix
problems before they happen. Probably best to do this
during normal work hours.
User experience data from around the world can detect
degrading, sluggish resources in real time and user-centric
app delivery logic powered by RUM can make quick rerou-
ting decisions automatically.
No more getting woken up after the application crashes.
While you’re wishing you had RUM on your side, you can
look up some fun facts from the countries experiencing
app outages. Did you know Luxembourgish is an official
language?
16
8.
Send an email. You, too, can be the weird colleague who
sends emails with crazy, middle-of-the-night time stamps.

9.
Do some virtual window shopping. Browse around to see
what you could have purchased with the money you were
just forced to spend on unplanned cloud instance provisio-
ning to keep your app running. That desktop Nerf missile
launcher (or 700 of them) would have been pretty nice.

10.
Swear off the game of chance. You’ve just proven it’s not
that much fun after all. Don’t just dump everything onto
one cloud and call it done.
Clouds go down for so many reasons. Use an application
delivery platform control layer to build in the capability to
auto-switch to an available

10 WAYS TO MAKE OUTAGE MITIGATION FUN 17


Self-sourced data
won’t get you where
you want to go
Simon Jones
Cedexis blog, August 31, 2017
HYBRID CLOUD - THE NEW NORMAL
Crowdsourced intelligence
is a powerful concept,
brought to reality and
fueled by the Internet and
mobile devices. Without
the communications
technology and vast but
addressable audience of
smartphone addicts,
marketing projects
dependent on gathering
data or pooling microtasks
from an undefined,
unrelated audience would
remain mostly theoretical.
22
Of course, companies outsourced tasks and polled cus-
tomers for data before crowdsourcing came along, but
soliciting a thousand survey responses takes a surprising
amount of work – and, importantly, time – without the
mobile Internet. Massive data projects like the Census or
NIH-funded longitudinal studies were carried out long
before the Internet, but required complex coordination,
significant resources, and a long timeline.
But ever since the term “crowdsource” was coined more
than a decade ago, the rapid, large-scale assembling of
ideas, opinions, funds, collaborators, computing power and
labor online has become commonplace. In its myriad, still
evolving forms, crowdsourcing has proven to be one of the
most groundbreaking tools of the mobile era.
Crowdsourcing technology has moved well beyond
market research and fundraising. One of the most popular
examples is Waze, where driver experience reports,
construction plans, emergency dispatches, and traffic
metrics are combined with algorithms to produce real-time
guidance for drivers. You may drive around the Bay Area a
lot and have a strong sense of traffic patterns based on
experience. But what happens if there’s an unexpected
event— let’s say a tornado in Palo Alto—or you have two
hours to get to a meeting near Sacramento, where you’ve
SELF-SOURCED DATA WON’T GET YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO GO
never driven before. Do you want to rely on your individual
experience, or do you want to consult the Waze app and
figure out how to avoid gridlock? (Bonus points for having
enough time for a side trip to Starbucks.)
Amazingly, we’re now able to apply the power of crowd-
sourcing to networks, endpoints, and bytes just as we to
people and cars.
In the Zettabyte era, community-powered intelligence is a
fundamental need if we’re really going to move 20,000
Gbps of global Internet traffic without constant outages,
slowdowns, and the inefficient yet miraculous worka-
rounds we too often demand from Ops teams — while also
controlling costs. Unless you are in the very highest eche-
lon of traffic delivery, your service simply won’t create
enough data to truly map the Internet. Heck, even if you
got 100 million hits a day, the chances are good they’d all
be clustered in a handful of major regions.
If you expand into a new market, or your app suddenly
becomes popular in Saskatchewan, or for any number of
reasons traffic from a previously quiet region surges
suddenly (consider the stochastic outcomes of natural
disasters, widespread cyber attacks, and political and cele-
brity happenings), you won’t have enough visibility or intelli-
23
 gence on hand to manage your traffic in that particular –
suddenly vital! – corner of the Internet. You need to
crowdsource the data that will give you the comprehensive
view of the Internet you need to avoid outages, ensure high
quality of experience (QoE) for users, and make efficient
use of your resources.
Let’ use Cedexis’ real user monitoring community Radar to
illustrate the challenge you’re up against. Our data sets are
based on Real User Monitoring (RUM) of Internet perfor-
mance at every step between the client and the clouds,
data centers, or CDNs hosting your application. To source
this data, we have created the world’s largest user expe-
rience community, in which publishers large and small
deposit network observations from their own service, then
share the aggregate total, so they can benefit from one
another’s presence.
50,000 130
networks service providers
Radar collects data from across Over 130 service providers
more than 50,000 networks feed metrics into Radar
daily daily
SELF-SOURCED DATA WON’T GET YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO GO
14 billion
RUM data points
Hundreds of millions of clients
generate over 14 billion RUM
data points every day
Banding these services together makes it possible to see
essentially all the networks in the world each day. We’re
talking about all the “little Internets ”Radar collects data from
more than 50,000 of these networks daily. More than 130
major service providers feed metrics into the system each
day. All told, hundreds of millions of clients generate over
14 billion RUM data points every day. That’s quite a crowd –
and one that basically no service could pull together all on
its own.
Community doesn’t just give you breadth of course, but
also depth: we get at least 10,000 individual data points
each day from over 13,000 of those ASNs. You simply can’t
glean that kind of traffic intelligence from your own system.
Do the math: you’ll see that even if you have 100 million
visitors each day, likely less than half are coming from
outside the major pockets (concentrated ASNs), leaving
you very few data points spread across the thousands of
remaining ASNs. So when the first visitor of the day turns up
from Des Moines, Iowa, or Ulan Bator, or Paris, France,
you’d have no data handy to make intelligent traffic deci-
sions.
Everyone needs community intelligence. Not just for the
newest, least understood pockets of users on the edges of
your network. Crowdsourced community intelligence from
24
the big, messy pools of so provides the early warning Instead, rely on community-based telemetry to produce
system every Operations team needs to keep the wheels the actionable intelligence and predictive power you need
turning, and the user using. to serve your end-users, no matter where they pop up.
Many countries have thousands of ISPs. In Brazil, the Radar
community supplies 10,000 daily data points from 1,595 With crowdsourced data sets from the global Internet
different ASNs. Russia, Canada, Australia, and Argentina also community, you already have instant access to intelligence
have enormous diversity of ISPs, especially in relation to about QoE, bottlenecks, and slowdowns — before you
their populations. These locations are likely to be central to even know you need it.
your business success and global content delivery needs.
Having user experience data of this breadth and depth is
particularly important where there are so many individual
peering agreements and technical relationships, represen-
ting countless causes for variable performance.
When there are countless ways for application delivery to
go wrong, you need granular data to feed into intelligent
delivery algorithms to ensure that, in the end, everything
goes right.

When you’re trying to manage application and content

delivery globally, you need visibility into thousands of ASNs
on a continuous basis. Unless you’re Google, you’re not
going to touch most of these networks at the depth you
need. So unless you have a really cool crystal ball, you have
no idea how they are performing. You’d have to conduct
an enormous amount of traffic to gain a comprehensive,
real-time view on your own.

SELF-SOURCED DATA WON’T GET YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO GO 25


Cloud capabilities turn
developers into operational
experts
Andrew Marshall
DevOps.com, August 7, 2017
HYBRID CLOUD - THE NEW NORMAL
The upside-down world of
digital transformation can
leave you feeling like you’ve
fallen down an internet
rabbit hole.
If you’re a DevOps denizen,
the swirling pace and scale
of virtualization might give
you that “lost in the Techni-
color forest” feeling when
it’s time to release an app
into the wild. “Curiouser
and curiouser!” you say as
you try to sort through
hybrid combinations of
private and public clouds,
CDNs, and data centers.
18
As a developer, you worked hard on the design, build and
test—now you want to make sure it takes the best, fastest
path to microservices and users. It’s folly to trust the answer
from any one source—synthetic measurements may purr
like a Cheshire Cat over hardware health, meanwhile the
White Rabbit of RUM (real user measurements) is spazzing
out over latency and traffic jams.
The lesson Alice finally learns in Lewis’ timeless tale?
She must learn to control the journey herself.
Developing for the complex cloud
Fortunately, there’s a way for developers to mix that “just
right” solution that will reveal the right path through the
internet forest. This used to be the purview of opera-
tions—setting up servers and delivery conduits.
In the pre-cloud era, developers just wrote code. Somebo-
dy in Ops pushed it live, and that part of the process was
opaque to the developer. With the proliferation and matura-
tion of the cloud, the Ops team is increasingly focused on
dynamic infrastructure and services. Developers routinely
spin up their own servers.
CLOUD CAPABILITIES TURN DEVELOPERS INTO OPERATIONAL EXPERTS
As DevOps teams focus more on microservices and contai-
ners and less on “stacking and racking” servers, perfo-
mance, control and delivery become the focus areas that
matter. As the division between Dev and Ops experts conti-
nues to dissolve, each becomes increasingly aware of the
other’s roles, responsibilities and skill sets.
The goals of agile development, non-stop testing and
optimized delivery become the shared destination; paths
merge until everyone is creating momentum around the
prized feedback loop. As infrastructure and services
become more abstracted, the focus is less on writing origi-
nal code and building stacks and more on selecting
resources.
The selection and use of these resources has to be strategi-
cally guided by real-time intelligence to meet multiple
performance and business objectives.
The more abstract and hybridized the infrastructure beco-
mes—and it is moving rapidly in that direction for every
business—the harder it is to navigate.
If you can’t keep all your resources straight, you can’t opti-
mize them. Centralizing and automating tracking and traffic
management is mission-critical.
19
The delivery is in the code
Which brings us back to the developer’s mandate to
control and optimize delivery from the application.
Cloud-based delivery tools combine real-time user mea-
surement with scriptable application traffic shaping and
built-in cost controls. Gone are the days of blaming poor
performance on the network. End users expect seamless,
instantaneous experiences, no matter what. This is a tall
order for modern apps that combine video, microservices
and dynamic content. To ensure high quality of experience
(QoE), you have to automate and optimize with
software-defined delivery. Developers can now contribute
to optimization by coding in delivery intelligence.
This isn’t merely another task for the developer; it’s an
opportunity. Developers are now empowered to deliver the
functionality of their product or service exactly as designed.
CLOUD CAPABILITIES TURN DEVELOPERS INTO OPERATIONAL EXPERTS
Developers are now actively part of the process that brings
together global and local traffic management data (RUM
and infrastructure health), application performance mana-
gement and cost considerations to ensure the cheapest,
fastest path to that microservice. The balance and mix of
these factors can be customized and fine-tuned by the
developer (a.k.a., the newly minted operations expert).
The bleeding edge becomes the be-
drock
You know the cloud is no fairy tale when 74 percent of tech
CFOs claim that this year the most measurable impact on
their business will come directly from cloud computing.
Spending on cloud computing is set to grow at 19 percent
CAGR through 2020, six times the rate of overall IT spen-
ding. Developers who can harness the magic of hybrid
cloud/CDN for video, web content and application delivery
will be rock stars. Picture it: fully automated delivery based
on business rules, actionable data from real user and syn-
thetic testing, and self-healing network optimizations.
Developers can push their capabilities and control right to
the bleeding edge, making them an even more agile contri-
butor to the continuous improvement cycle.
20
Soon enough, as technology progresses and infrastructure
is increasingly software-defined, these skills will become a
requirement.

Over the next few years, this data-driven approach to app

and content delivery will be considered a standard capabi-
lity for digital businesses and a core responsibility for deve-
lopers. The forward momentum of organizations that have
committed to both cloud-first and DevOps-first strategies is
powerful and will quickly boost early adopting competitors
out of reach.

The number of developer-operators capable of managing

application delivery in capacity-aware, consumer-res-
ponsive, application-tuned ways will soon build to critical
mass. Don’t get left behind, wandering lost in the woods.

CLOUD CAPABILITIES TURN DEVELOPERS INTO OPERATIONAL EXPERTS 21

 Automobile congestion is
a scourge in most cities
around the world.
The negative impacts are
varied: personal time
wasted sitting in traffic,
Metrics that beat dangerous accidents,
delayed arrival of
Murphy’s law emergency vehicles,
Simon Jones environmental damage
Cedexis blog, August 23, 2017 from stop-and-go driving,
inefficient delivery
logistics… the list goes on.

HYBRID CLOUD - THE NEW NORMAL 26

Stop signs and simple on-off timed signals were sufficient
to direct traffic in the early years; in recent decades, camera
and sensor-triggered traffic lights became necessary to
address mounting congestion and protect pedestrians.
With congestion and pollution problems mounting, Ligh-
thouse Cities like Cologne, Barcelona and Stockholm are
piloting smart traffic management systems. These innova-
tive combinations of software controllers and connected
sensors in traffic lights and vehicles will optimize travel
speeds, delivery routes, and public transportation links to
prevent accidents, untangle bottlenecks, and balance the
ratio of car drivers and rail riders.
Building towards a future of sustai-
nable internet traffic
Internet traffic has followed similar patterns on an accele-
rated timeline. Local load balancers were sufficient to divvy
up incoming requests between a handful of servers sitting
in the same place. With the explosion of Internet data use
and development of cloud and virtual infrastructure, local
load balancers (LLBs) have proliferated and need to be
managed like endpoints themselves. Application Delivery
Controllers address this issue for data centers, but aren’t
upto the task in a hybrid IT world. To optimize modern
METRICS THAT BEAT MURPHY’S LAW
Internet infrastructure — increasingly a combination of data
centers, CDNs, co-los, and regional AWS resources — we
need an innovative smart traffic management system, too.
Like the street traffic control systems in widespread use
today, basic Global Load Balancers (GLBs) are an essential
start, but we need something more dynamically
data-driven, real-time responsive, and configurable to spe-
cific scenarios. This is especially true for DevOps organiza-
tions.
Murphy’s law applies:
All the things that can go wrong…
When LLBs are not intelligent and dynamically controlled,
quality of experience (QoE) degrades, provisioning econo-
mics are out of whack, and outages occur. Even with failo-
ver mechanisms in place, if traffic gets sent to an LLB clus-
ter that is down, it often takes an unacceptable amount of
time to switch over. Sometimes, a location is working fine
but starting to bump up against resource limits.
A shift or failure in another location could cause so much
traffic to flow to the near-capacity resource that it breaks,
resulting in an entirely avoidable outage (and another fun
post-midnight emergency intervention).
In multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructure for application and
27
media delivery, the sought-after advantages of scalability,
agility, and affordability are lost when there is no ove-
rarching control layer. Without intelligent global traffic
control, one location will be overused and in danger of
failing if something unexpected happens, while another
location will be underused. Data Center resources are
already paid for under CapEx, as opposed to OpEx cloud
spot instances; intelligent, configurable GLBs can maintain
the difficult balance between low cost and high cost loca-
tions in your specific resource mix.
METRICS THAT BEAT MURPHY’S LAW
Outages are unnecessary evils
Everybody hates outages – users, developers, sys admins,
sales teams, and executives. You might be able to keep
your cloud budget woes to yourself, but outages big and
small chip away at your brand, reputation, and app or site
popularity.
Dynamic GLBs use real-time health checks to detect
potential traffic or resource problems, route around them,
and send an alert before failure occurs so that you can
address the root cause (during normal work hours, imagine
that).
Even with a failover plan, LLBs allowed to run without
real-time intelligence are susceptible to slowdowns,
micro-outages, and cascading failures, especially if hit with
a DDOS attack or unexpected surge.
There are times when it’s necessary to shift your standard
resource model: updates, repairs, natural disasters, and app
or service launches. Without scriptable load balancing, you
have to dedicate significant time to shifting resources
around — and problems mount quickly if someone takes
down a resource but forgets to make the proper notifica-
tions and preparations ahead of time.
28

Intelligent GLBs are here to save
the day
The direct benefits of implementing a scriptable,
user-configurable, data-driven global load balancing plat-
form for hybrid architectures are three-fold: performance,
economics, and control (including the ability to account for
region-specific regulatory requirements).
Feeding high quality, real-time datasets (LLB and cloud
monitoring, server availability, real user measurements, and
other resource health checks) into traffic decision engines
automates the entire delivery path, optimizing application
availability and latency for consistently high QoE, swift
resolution of congestion and outages, and fine-tuned
control over resource use and cost.
This automated approach to software-defined application
delivery is essential for DevOps innovation; continuous
integration and delivery methods can’t wait for hardware
changes, and the growing use of microservices and contai-
ners requires application-level control that developers can
understand and configure.
Moreover, software-defined global load balancers are
METRICS THAT BEAT MURPHY’S LAW
designed to work the same way on all platforms, so
smooth deployment is possible, no matter your resource
mix.
It may be hard to imagine now, especially if you are stuck in
the transportation grind of a major urban area, but we may
one day live in cities where cars and public transportation
flow and connect seamlessly, air pollution is minimal, and
road rage is an embarrassing relic of the past.
When it comes to Internet traffic, we can start living the
dream much sooner. After all, nobody in 1995 would have
believed predictions about binge watching entire sitcom
seasons on your handheld wireless computer while going
about your daily routine. With intelligent, dynamic global
load balancing, we’re well on our way to yet another step
change in application and content delivery.
29
Cloud-First
+ DevOps-First
= 81% Competitive Advantage
To ensure that an app performs as designed, and end users
have a high quality experience, agile teams need to
automate and optimize with software-defined delivery.

Simon Jones
Cedexis blog, August 23, 2017

HYBRID CLOUD - THE NEW NORMAL 30

We recently ran across a fascinating article by Jason
Bloomberg, a recognized expert on agile digital transforma-
tion, that examines the interplay between Cloud-First and
DevOps-First models. That article led us, in turn, to an
infographic centered on some remarkable findings from a
CA Technologies survey of 900-plus IT pros from around
the world. The survey set out to explore the synergies
between Cloud and DevOps, specifically in regards to
software delivery. You can probably guess why we snapped
to attention.
The study found that 20 percent of the organizations repre-
sented identified themselves as being strongly committed
to both Cloud and DevOps, and their software delivery
outperformed other categories (Cloud only, DevOps only,
and slow adopters) by 81 percent.
category than the DevOps-only companies.
These findings, among others, got us to thinking about the
potential benefits and advantages such Delivery Disruptors
can gain from adding Cedexis solutions into their powerful
mix. Say, for example, you have agile dev teams working on
new products and apps and you want to shorten the exe-
cution time for new cloud projects.
To let your developers focus on writing code, you need an
app delivery control layer that supports multiple teams and
architectures.

This group earned the label “Delivery Disruptors” for their

outlying success at maximizing agility and velocity on
software projects. On factors of predictability, quality, user
experience, and cost control, the Disruptor organizations
soared above those employing traditional methods, as well
as Cloud-only and DevOps-only methods, by large percen-
tages. With the Cedexis application delivery platform, you can
For example, Delivery Disruptors were 117 percent better at support agile processes, deliver frequent releases, control
cost control than Slow Movers, and 75 percent better in this cloud and CDN costs, guarantee uptime and performance,

CLOUD-FIRST+ DEVOPS-FIRST = 81% COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 00

31
and optimize hybrid infrastructure. Your teams get to work user and synthetic testing, and self-healing network optimi-
their way, in their specific environment, without worrying zations. Incorporating these capabilities with a maturing
about delivery issues looming around every corner. Cloud-first and DevOps-first approach will likely put the top
performers so far ahead of the rest of the pack, they’ll
Application development is constantly changing thanks to barely be on the same racetrack.
advances like containerization and microservice architec-
ture — not to mention escalating consumer demand for
seamless functionality and instant rich media content. And
in a hybrid, multi-cloud era, infrastructure is so complex
and abstracted, delivery intelligence has to be embedded in
the application (you can read more about what our Archi-
tect, Josh Gray, has to say about delivery-as-code here).

To ensure that an app performs as designed, and end users

have a high quality experience, agile teams need to auto-
mate and optimize with software-defined delivery. Agile
teams can achieve new levels of delivery disruption by
bringing together global and local traffic management data
(for instance, RUM, synthetic monitoring results, and local
load balancer health), application performance manage-
ment, and cost considerations to ensure the optimal path
through datacenters, clouds, and CDNs.

Imagine the agility and speed a team can contribute to

digital transformation initiatives with fully automated app
delivery based on business rules, actionable data from real

CLOUD-FIRST+ DEVOPS-FIRST = 81% COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 32

 One of the genuinely diffi-
cult decisions being made
by DevOps, Ops, and even
straight-up developers
today is how to ensure
outstanding quality of ex-
perience (QoE) for their
users.
Do you balance the hard-
ware (physical, virtual, or
otherwise) for optimal
Optimizing load? Or track quality of
for resources service (QoS) metrics – like
throughput, latency, video
and consumers alike start time, and so forth –
and use those as the pri-
Simon Jones
Cedexis blog, June 20, 2017 mary guide?

HYBRID CLOUD - THE NEW NORMAL 33

It’s really not a great choice, which is why we’re happy to
say, the right answer to the question of whether to use
local or global traffic management is: both.
It hasn’t been a great choice in the past because, while
synthetic and real user measurements (RUM) overlap pretty
broadly, neither is the subset of the other. For instance,
RUM might be telling you that users are getting great QoE
from a cluster of virtual servers in Northern Virginia –
but it doesn’t tell you if those servers are near their capacity
limits, and could do with some help to prevent overloading.
Conversely, synthetic data can tell you where the most
abundant resources are to complete a computational,
storage, or delivery task – but they generally can’t tell you
whether the experience at the point of consumption will be
one of swift execution, or of fluctuating network service
that causes a video to constantly sputter and pause as the
user’s client tries to buffer the next chunk.
Today, though, you can combine the best of both worlds,
as Cedexis has partnered with NGINX and their NGINX +
product line to produce a unique application delivery opti-
mization solution.
OPTIMIZING FOR RESOURCES AND CONSUMERS ALIKE
Think of it as a marriage of local traffic management (LTM)
and global traffic management (GTM). LTM takes care of
routing traffic that arrives at a (virtual or physical) location
between individual resources efficiently, ensuring that
resources don’t get overloaded (and of course, spins up
new instances when ready); GTM takes care of working out
which location gets the request in the first place. Historical-
ly, LTM has been essentially blind to user experience; and
GTM has been limited to relatively basic local network data
(simple “is-it-working” synthetic monitoring for the most
part).
Application delivery optimization demands not just
real-time knowledge of what’s happening at both ends, but
real-time routing decisions that ensure the end user is
getting the best experience. Combining LTM and GTM
makes it simple to
1.Improve on Round Robin or Geo-based balancing.
For sure, physical proximity is a leading indicator of superior
experience (all else being equal, data that has to travel
shorter distances will arrive more quickly).
By adding awareness of QoE at the point of consumption,
however, Ops teams can ensure that geographically-boun-
ded congestion or obstructions (say, for instance, peering
34
 Cloud API

Local load balancer End user

Application-defined
CDN API Data feed load balancing End user

Server data
fusion openmix End user
Application API
Any End user

between a data center and an ISP) can be avoided by
re-routing traffic to a higher-performing, if more geographi-
cally distant, option.
In its simplest iteration, the algorithm simply says “so long
as we can get a certain level of quality, choose the closest
source, but never use any source that dips below that
quality floor”.
2.Re-route around unavailable server instances.
Each data center or cloud may combine a cluster of server
instances, balanced by NGINX +. When one of those
instances becomes unavailable, however (whether through
catastrophic collapse, or simply scheduled maintenance),
the LTM can let the GTM know of its reduced capacity, and
start the process of routing traffic to other alternatives
before any server instance become overloaded.
In essence, here the LTM is telling the GTM not to get too
carried away with QoE – but to check that future expe-
riences have a good chance of mirroring those being
delivered in the present.
3.Avoid application problems.
NGINX+ lets Openmix know the health of the application in
a given node in real-time. So if, for instance, an application
update is made to a subset of application servers, and it

OPTIMIZING FOR RESOURCES AND CONSUMERS ALIKE 35

starts to throw an unusual number of 50xˆerrors, the GTM
can start to route around that instance, and alert DevOps of
an application problem. In this way, app updates can be
distributed to some (but not all) locations throughout the
network, then automatically de-provisioned if they turn out
not be functioning as expected.

Combining the power of real user measurements, hard-

ware health, and application health, will mean expanding
the ability of every team to deliver a high QoE to every
customer.

At no point will user’s requests be sent to servers approa-

ching full use; nor will they be sent to sprightly resources
who can’t actually deliver QoE owing to network conges-
tion that is beyond their control.

It also, of course, will create a new standard: once a critical

mass of providers is managing its application delivery in this
capacity-aware, consumer-responsive, application-tuned
way, a rush will develop for those who have not yet
reached this point to catch up. So take a moment now to
explore how combining the LTM and GTM capabilities of
NGINX+ and Cedexis might make sense for your environ-
ment – and get a step up on your competition.

OPTIMIZING FOR RESOURCES AND CONSUMERS ALIKE 36

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Cedexis, now part of the Citrix group, provides web-scale, end-user experience monitoring and real-time traffic routing across multiple clouds and networks.

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