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Speed is king for websites. Something as simple as the time it takes a webpage to load affects visitor retention rates and acts as a signifier of the website’s quality. A key ingredient in website speed is caching, and the proxy servers and reverse proxies that websites use to handle caching needs.

In the last post in this series, we compared serverless and containers for modern applications, discussing many of the advantages of working with serverless. However, serverless is not without its challenges. In order to get the most out of serverless architecture, it is important to select the right serverless platform and adhere to best practices.

Wordpress has been around for 17 years and helped shape the internet into what it is today. Launched in 2003, by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, it aimed to be "an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system", according to their own blog. Hosting almost one third of the internet's webpages, from blogs and news sites to online stores, Wordpress is synonyms to content creating on the web today.

Containers and serverless are two options for deploying microservices, the architecture used in modern applications. Microservices provide the needed agility and performance for today’s applications and are optimized for the cloud, making them crucial to a business’s growth and readiness for the future as 5G and edge infrastructure deployments become increasingly prevalent.

Anyone who’s ever postponed installing a new OS to the newest version can attest to the technical issues that arise when older systems are not updated. Continuing to use outmoded technology can lead to a world of problems, from security issues to poor performance and reliability. As a result, the need to modernize is clear to many businesses. However, the process for modernization is decidedly less straightforward, with strategies that run the gamut from “lifting and shifting” an application onto newer infrastructure to replacing or rewriting the old application from scratch.

Microservices were once an alternative to monolithic application architecture. They presented a new mode of development with its own set of risks and rewards. Now, we are reaching a tipping point where it’s no longer a question of whether to migrate, but when to migrate. However, migrating is a challenging process that can pose problems if executed poorly. This post will cover why microservices are necessary, the challenges of migrating to microservices, and how to devise a plan for migration.

Today, Azion is pleased to announce the Early Access release of Azion Marketplace, a new feature of our Edge Computing platform that lets developers easily find, deploy, and manage third-party applications.

One of the buzziest topics that exists in computing today is over the modernization of legacy applications. With the rise of 5G, Edge Computing, and serverless architecture, many companies are wondering whether--and how--to rethink applications for today’s digital landscape. To help shed some light on these concerns, we’re introducing a series of posts that will discuss application modernization from a variety of business and technical perspectives, with a focus on one of the most widely discussed aspects of modernization, the use of microservices.

First introduced in 2014, JAMStack is a more modern approach to building fast, secure, highly scalable and well-performing websites and apps. Instead of a commercial offering, JAMStack is a community-based set of best practices and workflows to maximize website-building efficiency.

In a previous post, we announced Early Access for Edge Functions, a new product for building and running event-driven serverless functions. After three months of Early Access, with dozens of use cases already implemented, the beta release of Edge Functions is now available to all our customers with JavaScript support.

No one really enjoys waiting for anything--particularly in today’s fast-paced world. That’s why the moments that pass between a user clicking a link to a website and seeing it appear in their browser can make or break the success of that site. These few crucial seconds (or milliseconds) are known as latency, one of the most important performance metrics in application delivery and network performance.

This past June, 3GPP completed Release 16, which not only provided support for ultra-low latency communications (URLLC) and massive machine-type communications (mMTC), but also helped realize another Industrial IoT building block: private networks. Private networks are cellular networks used by individual enterprises or other organizations, such as police stations or fire departments, and configured for the organization’s individual needs.

You’ve probably heard (many times) that one of the biggest advantages of serverless compute is that you don’t have to manage your application’s infrastructure, freeing you to focus on the front end without worrying about things like backend security or provisioning servers. This, however, presupposes that you are not a compulsive worrier.

It’s almost impossible to talk about 5G without using words like “game-changing,” “revolutionary,” and “breakthrough.” And while we tech bloggers tend to use these words a lot, it’s not hyperbole in this case: 5G standards really are much more ambitious than the capabilities of LTE and legacy networks. But in order to deliver on the promises of 5G networks, the devices and applications using them will need to be as efficient as possible.

The internet is a magical place. Well, okay, maybe not everything on the internet, but the internet itself, the fact that you can type example.com into a search engine and access a webpage with the exact information you were seeking.

Since the dawn of the internet, automation has been a buzzword and aspiration for companies, constantly seeking new ways to reduce human micro-management of IT by allowing software to perform tasks automatically.

You may have heard the phrase “no latency, gigabit experience” as a shorthand for what 5G will deliver. However, 5G’s capabilities extend far beyond improving the performance you’ll get on your mobile phone. It will also populate smart cities and with high-density, low-energy consumption IoTs that can be used to improve public safety and conserve resources, and will enable mission-critical uses like remote surgery, where a high-speed, uninterrupted network connection is literally a matter of life and death.

In our previous posts, we’ve looked at 5G from the perspective of networks: how they’re being deployed, what deployment entails, and how MEC can help service providers implement 5G and achieve 5G performance standards. However, the way most people will experience 5G isn’t through the theoretical capabilities of a network, but through the performance of devices and applications that run on those networks.

A load balancer is similar to a reverse proxy. That means it acts as a proxy for the server in client-server connections, as opposed to a forward proxy, which would act as a proxy for the client. When a client device attempts to connect to a service, a load balancer for that service accepts the connection, and then decides which of its servers to forward the connection to, based on the rules of the load balancing algorithm it was programmed with (more on that in a moment).

At Azion, we take pride in our ability to offer high-performing, low latency serverless capabilities to businesses of all sizes. We couldn’t have done any of this without our sophisticated orchestration technology, which manages our complex infrastructure and has enabled us to automate the daily maintenance of our ICT. It’s been the backbone of our company for years, but we only recently realized that a tool this powerful should be put directly into the hands of our customers.

It’s no secret that the growing prevalence and sophistication of mobile devices has transformed everyday life. Just a few decades ago, movies could only be viewed in theaters or at home, maps were physical objects you kept in your car’s glove box, and video chatting was the stuff of science fiction. Now, anyone who can’t download Netflix, Google Maps, and Zoom on their phone is practically a Luddite. However, as wireless devices become more widespread and sophisticated, they will require additional bandwidth, quality, and network availability—which is exactly what 5G was designed to deliver.

Fully harnessing the power of 5G, the fifth generation of mobile networks, is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. 5G’s game-changing performance is due to its ability to run over radio frequencies in higher parts of the spectrum than is supported by today’s 3G and 4G networks. However, it will cost billions of dollars for telcos to pay for spectrum bands and build the cell towers and antennas needed to scale 5G networks, and consumers won’t be able to use these networks until they buy devices that can connect to 5G’s sub-6 GHz and mmWave frequencies. In other words, until 5G infrastructure is widely available, consumers won’t be motivated to buy 5G devices, and until more people are using 5G devices, there’s no reason to scale 5G infrastructure.

The Zero Trust model was introduced in 2010 by Forrester Research. The approach can be summed up in a few words: trust no one, not even employees. Over the next decade, new cloud applications were born and cloud adoption accelerated. Salesforce, ServiceNow, Shopify, Workday, Atlassian, Square, DocuSign, Slack, Box and other must-have apps became a part of the corporate digital toolset.

With Edge Functions, you can build "without origin" applications that entirely run on the Edge.

Edge computing offers unique advantages in the market with 100x more efficiency and up to 10x less costs compared to containers.

Discover Azion Cells, a serverless application framework and runtime for Turing-complete languages, built for ultra-low latency edge-native applications and real-time data analysis

Data Streaming allows our clients to feed SIEM, Big Data, and stream processing platforms with real-time data from their content and applications.

Azion products are built with distributed and redundant architecture in different layers, and we are constantly looking at ways to improve the availability, performance and security of our products and services. Intelligent DNS has a global infrastructure and an anycast network. In other words, queries that require DNS resolution are routed to the part of the globe and point of presence closest to the user.

We are pleased to announce that, as requested by many of our clients, we have improved the process for delivering Azion Origin Shield. The new functionality means that you can now automate the rule settings in your firewall to give access to your origin to specific IP addresses from our network only and block all other access.

Edge Computing is already being talked about by some of the main technology research and consulting companies, like Forrester and IDC. So what, when it comes down to it, are the likely trends for Edge Computing over the next few years. Looking back at some of the recently published studies, we can see that there have been a number of predictions on the importance of this technology at this crucial moment in digital transformation.