What happened to the Internet Yesterday?

If you’re responsible for network uptime on massive public sites like Amazon, Reddit, and CNN, yesterday was a stressor, as websites went offline for nearly 45 minutes.

The cause?

Content Distribution Network provider Fastly; reportedly a software ‘bug’.

Computing buying decisions, similar to housing and transportation buying, require us to make a decision; do we buy or lease our network requirements.  As more options become available for greater speed, agility, performance, Software Defined everything is providing businesses with necessary computing flexibility.   But how does flexibility affect network reliability?

Akin to leasing real estate, the option of on-demand resources is attractive and oftentimes cost-effective, especially given, “bursty” patterns of demand.  A consideration to cloud or service ‘on demand” is typically control of the resource.  As evidence yesterday by the outage (I would not want to be on the hook to global websites out of business), things can and do go wrong on networks.   When you have an outage, how do you access core network elements for service or repair?

If the answer to the question above is, “In-band” management, you may want to consider other options.

In the diagram listed below, we put the top example of a user deploying network resources to ‘repair’ or maintain a remote company location.  This type of access is certainly commonplace while maintain a reliable consistent web presence.   Often, as network designers/operators, we put a lot of effort into physical Network redundancy, buy neglect secure access to network elements.  This is where encrypted Out-of-Band Management, is able to provide a physical path to your network, even if there’s a network outage.  Network Managers place a considerable amount of resources into achieving performance; having the proper Out of Band Management” access may also be a hard requirement.

CDI designs, manufacturers, and supports and large variety of secure Out-of-Band Management and power control options.  If you would like more information, please visit, www.commdevices.com