It’s not just ecommerce sites, either: for this quarter’s State of the Union Report, we decided to look at the top 50 websites of four key industries to see what web performance bottlenecks were prevalent, and we learned quite a bit in analyzing news, travel and sports sites, along with ecommerce.
I do a lot of my purchases through online and physical ‘superstores’ that provide a one-stop shopping experience. I do this because I am confident that they have what I want, when I want it. It is convenient to know that I can always have access to the items that I need without having to resort to an involved search and discovery process. An interesting side effect of this process was that the purchasing and delivery of my items became more efficient. There are processes and components that can be streamlined based on the ‘superstore’ model through unified shopping carts, consistent interfaces, and other functions.
I recently spent time travelling internationally for work. During my trip in one of the countries, I caught a nasty bug. I won’t give you the details, but suffice to say I was not working at 100% physically and mentally. Of course, I spent a lot of time planning this trip, speaking at certain events, and meeting different teams and customers. I had to find a way to perform to meet everyone’s expectations. I had to identify the cause of my sub-par state and then find a solution to fix it which included hydration, vitamins, and medicine.
In today’s virtualized world, organizations are looking for a single pane of glass – for visibility to user, application and network health, real-time status and performance data that is relevant. Why is this important? And how does this tie into orchestration and automation?
When provisioning applications and network infrastructure on-demand, particular attention is required when responses are slowing down, so proactive monitoring is critical. It’s important to know when an application is not meeting its SLA requirements or security attacks may be impacting application performance. AND it’s important to know these issues before they become a business disruption.
In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus was chained to a rock. Every day, an eagle flew down and ate part of his liver. The organ regenerated during the night, replenishing the food source. The liver is one of the few organs in the human body that can spontaneously regenerate. Even more impressive, is the fact that while the liver is regenerating and fixing itself, it is still functional. The ancient Greeks knew of this capability and incorporated it to their mythology almost 3000 years ago.
I am constantly driving around town. When I am lucky, there are no problems and I can easily get to my destination. Rarely, there will be a scheduled event like a holiday parade or triathlon going through part of town requiring roads to be closed. Instead of trying to find an alternate path, I often end up turning around and going home.
In between these two situations, I usually end up stuck in some traffic. It may be the lunch time rush or the school bus is dropping off students after school. This delays my journey, but I bear with the unforeseen circumstances and eventually make it where I was trying to get to.
It is easy to know when there is an outage. Things do not work, people complain, and businesses lose money. It is much harder to know when an application is working, but in a sub-par manner. These scenarios are harder to identify and fix. Ultimately, these degradation situations may be costing the company more money than the outages.
Over the past twelve months, our team of authors has offered advice, expertise, and analysis on a variety of topics facing the application delivery and security communities. The articles below are the most read and shared ones we published this year. Our goal was (and is) to share our experience and knowledge so you, our readers, can better prepare, implement, and gain insights that you can apply to your business.
Mobile devices travel the world with us. Whether we’re flying, taking the train or doing the old-fashioned road trip, our smartphones are almost always within reach – if not in hand – and we take them to theme parks, hotels and Grandma’s house.
It was inevitable: travelers are utilizing their smartphones to research and make arrangements for their trips, as smartphone and data network penetration continues its inexorable climb toward establishing a truly “mobile-first” world.
