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At Azion, we’re always looking for better (and more scalable) ways to increase our customers’ observability and access to platform statistics and analytics. In this spirit, we’re happy to announce the availability of our GraphQL API, giving our customers access to the same datasets we use internally to power our Real-Time Metrics.

In this article, we talk about how edge is enabling the next wave of applications using the macro trends developers love with Alessandro Cauduro, Azion’s new Chief Developer Experience Officer (CDXO).

Do you know nothing about edge computing and want to learn about this technology? Have you read about it but don't understand how it works? In this article, we describe it simply and tell you the essentials.

Earlier this year, we provided customers with added assurance for the security of our platform with SOC 2 Type 2 compliance. And today, we are pleased to announce that our customers can request access to this independent audit of our security and availability controls with the attainment of our SOC 3 report.

For many CISOs and other security professionals today, the decision to move to zero trust is an easy one—the question that remains is how to get there. This blog will explain the components and reference architecture needed for effective zero trust security, examine the barriers to implementation, and discuss how the right vendor can help simplify integration and reduce costs.

Azion Build Supports Frictionless Development with Comprehensive Tools and Support for Leading Architectures and Frameworks

WebAssembly (also known as WASM) is an assembly-like language that allows code written in compiled languages—such as C, C++, Go, Python, Rust, and many others—to run at near-native speed on the Web. WebAssembly provides some key features for web development.

With the exponential increase in mobile devices connected to the internet, which is estimated to double between 2022 and 2029, the volume of data is increasing, so tools such as data streaming are important to obtain deep data in real time about the performance and security of your applications.

On October 14th, we held the Azion Hackathon, an event where our employees have 24 hours to propose the best and most complete solution to a thematic challenge.

Find out how Azion's edge computing technology gives APIs a superior level of protection and integrity.

Here at Azion, we're dedicated to simplifying the development process with a platform that expands the possibilities of building at the edge. To further that goal, we've appointed Alessandro Cauduro as our inaugural Chief Developer Experience Officer (CDXO). Cauduro will lead the developer experience strategy at Azion and leverage his vast experience to accelerate our efforts in building and supporting our developer community.

Cloud computing has long been the favored infrastructure choice among startups, but as businesses rapidly scale, hypergrowth startups—also known as scale-ups—may suffer under the weight of large and unexpected bills. In addition, a lack of real-time analytics and cloud complexity can inhibit digital innovation for companies seeking to create disruptive products. For hypergrowth startups seeking scalable, cost-effective infrastructure, is there another way forward?

We just added a new feature to our platform that will further increase your business agility and ensure that your team is able to innovate even faster: Next.js.

You may not have heard the term Extended Reality (XR) before, but you’ve definitely interacted with its subsets, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, in some form or other. In the past several years, XR has grown from a science-fiction concept to a multibillion dollar industry. This has been largely due to a great deal of investment in the development of XR tools and software from some of the biggest tech companies in the world.

Have you ever wanted to control access to your application so that users can only access it during a certain period of the day? Azion has a new feature that can help you solve this problem: the edge function Scheduled Blocking.

In this post, we present what a cookie tampering attack is and how Azion's Signed Cookies solution can be used to prevent this attack from running in your applications.

In our mission to revolutionize the digital world and drive the hyper-connected economy, we believe that the sky is no longer the limit. That's why we're announcing the new Azion CLI: our command-line interface that improves developer experience on our platform and further powers what you can do at the edge.

Edge computing is a big opportunity with lots of use cases for only one company to build alone. To accomplish this, a provider of this kind of service must not only have a wide range of its own solutions but also partner with innovators and leaders across different verticals to add immediate value to developers and businesses of any size. For this reason, we are proud to introduce the Azion Marketplace, our new ecosystem of third-party, open source communities and developer solutions that integrate with the Azion Edge Platform to push the boundaries of what's possible at the edge.

Zero trust is increasingly promoted as a must-have for modern security, but is it really a top priority for security teams adapting to new compliance requirements and data protection laws? In the midst of increased data privacy regulations, a larger and more complex attack surface, and rising attacks, adopting a new security framework may seem like an overwhelming task. But in addition to strengthening security, zero trust can actually ease many of the complications that security teams are facing by providing a scalable approach that is well-suited to complex modern applications and a patchwork of geographically specific data privacy laws.

Any tech industry professional is aware that using passwords is no longer enough to provide adequate levels of security. With that in mind, Azion offers two-factor authentication on its platform.

Over the past years, businesses around the world have rapidly accelerated their digital transformation – but have their approaches to compliance kept pace with the changes? Companies that do not keep compliance top of mind as part of their digital transformation strategy risk financial and reputational damages that can reduce or even outweigh the benefits of modernization. And with a rise in data privacy regulations and more conscientious consumers, the costs of non-compliance are even greater.

The highest possible security for your data and applications and a frictionless user experience are among Azion's top priorities. For that reason, we've further simplified the way you access our Real-Time Manager, using a new Social Login feature.

If you feel like cybersecurity today has become more challenging than ever, you’re right. Alarming trends in DDoS and ransomware, the need to modernize security to accommodate remote work and other trends, an ever-increasing number of hard-to-detect bad bots, and a shortage of skilled security personnel have left many teams scrambling to respond to cyber attacks. Fortunately, building a strong cyber threat intelligence program can help teams not only mitigate the fallout from attacks, but plan targeted, proactive strategies to get ahead of attackers and make the most of their team’s capabilities.

Hackathon is an event held twice a year at Azion that invites our team members to the challenge of researching, developing, and launching a new solution for our edge platform in just 24 hours.

Reinforcing our commitment to the security and simplicity of our platform, Azion is pleased to announce the adoption of personal tokens for accessing our APIs and CLI.

Meeting PCI compliance regulations gives your customers the assurance that you take their privacy and security seriously. Unfortunately, the same regulations that ensure your customers’ data security can add latency to your site. At Azion, we believe that security shouldn’t come at the cost of performance. That’s why we’re proud to announce that we are now a PCI DSS 3.2.1 Level 1 compliant service provider, effective across all of our edge platform services--delivering the security your business requires with the performance you’ve come to expect.

With the rise in cyberattacks and passage of new data security laws, finding a secure service provider for your applications and websites has never been more important. That’s why we at Azion have invested in validating our security controls to assure our customers that the applications and websites delivered by our edge platform are kept safe and available. And today, we are pleased to announce that Azion has achieved SOC 2 Type 2 compliance.

Jamstack is a modern approach to develop and deploy websites at scale. This approach decouples the frontend from the backend and databases. The frontend is prebuilt into highly optimized static pages and assets using a Markup language such as HTML. Being static, these assets can be deployed on an edge platform for faster delivery. The backend applications that generate dynamic content are usually accessed using APIs, making pages rich and personalized.

Azion Data Streaming is our data delivery tool, and a critical player in our observability full-stack of tools. Good analytics is critical to the success of your enterprise security, web maintenance, and business insights, and data delivery methods like Azion Data Streaming provide the raw information that analytics tools need to produce valuable metrics.

As all Azion customers already know, our commitment to the security and simplicity of our platform is among our highest priorities. For this reason, we are pleased to introduce our new Single Sign-On (SSO) feature, which enables federated authentication across Azion products.

Considering the diversity of forms and its wide reach of DDoS attacks (extended, basically, to any company or entity that has an online presence), this post explains how Azion DDoS Protection protects against the main types of attacks to avoid major financial losses and damage to the image of your company.

In the communications industry it is common to hear that an image is worth a thousand words. The power of images is indisputable. Indeed, various studies have shown that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and the brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text.

The hyperconnected economy requires higher quality, faster and more consistent user experiences, and this poses increasing challenges for ISPs. With more and more devices connected to the Internet, demand continues to increase exponentially, and it’s necessary to ensure customers are kept happy. However, at the same time, companies must find smart ways to grow without losing control of costs. Building solutions that are focused on improving routing is one of the main challenges in today's reality. This blog post will provide a closer look at the Azion Edge Network and how Azion’s Edge Traffic Router uses SDN to deliver superior performance to our customers.

The Internet through its constant growth, as an open technology, has become a complex and dynamic network. Consequently, organizations from different industries demand specialized infrastructures that overcome the challenges of BGP to deploy their applications with personalized delivery, automatic scalability, security, data localization, intelligent routing, mobility, and low latency services.

Real-time data is critical for deep and powerful visibility. Among the observability products that Azion offers there is an essential solution for monitoring your applications and content: Real-Time Events.

This article explains what IoT is, its different forms and uses and its importance for the next digital revolution that we'll be going through, especially with the advent of 5G and the popularization of edge computing.

Let’s Encrypt is a free, open, and automated Certificate Authority (CA) used to issue SSL certificates using the ACME (Automatic Certificate Management Environment) protocol. SSL certificates are a crucial component for the security and success of a website, as they enable secure data transfer using HTTPS. Not only does HTTPS increase a site’s search engine positioning and users’ trust, it enables use of the HTTP/2 protocol, resulting in significant performance improvements over HTTP/1.

It’s a fact that the world can't continue without the Internet and users want the best performance. When a DNS is modern and on an edge computing platform, the benefits are even greater, providing a much better experience for business and end users. That's what Azion's Intelligent DNS delivers for you and your business.

With the costs of a cyberattack skyrocketing, it’s crucial that businesses make security a priority when planning their spending this year. But how much is enough, especially for businesses facing tight budget constraints? Understanding and prioritizing cybersecurity costs is crucial for IT decision makers to not only understand how much to spend, but ensure that their investment in security pays off. This blog post will help guide security spending decisions by reviewing how much companies spend on cybersecurity on average, which factors can drive up spending, and how to control security costs without compromising your security effectiveness.

Since the discovery of CVE-2021-44228 (also known as Log4Shell), Apache has released multiple patches to address vulnerabilities in its popular logging software Log4j. The speed with which this story has developed demonstrates how, even after a patching cycle, zero-day attacks pose a threat to security teams as cybercriminals are constantly searching for new attack vectors and workarounds for protections.

A zero-day exploit has been recently discovered in multiple versions of the Apache Log4j library that allows for unauthenticated remote code execution by logging a certain string. The vulnerability, which was published as CVE-2021-44228 on Friday, December 10, poses a severe risk due to the ubiquity of the popular Java-based logging library, how easy it is to exploit, and the impact of the attack, which gives unauthorized users full server control. To ensure that our customers are protected against this critical vulnerability, we’d like to share what we’ve done to guard against these attacks and what steps Azion users should take to ensure they are protected.

Do you know that accessing a website goes far beyond typing the address into the browser toolbar? There's a universe behind the scenes, things that we don't see in front of our screens, but that make this world called the Internet go round – and one of its key elements is the DNS.

The rise of cloud computing brought on-demand computing services to users connected to the Internet. Between 2006 and 2008, computer resources, such as storage and processing capacity, began to be offered commercially for medium and large companies. The increase of its popularity only forced the original cloud computing model to transform to new approaches or paradigms for providing more virtualized resources to a broader audience. Nowadays, we have many digital devices sending large amounts of data with high speed in real-time and connected to the network for long periods. This new approach requires virtualization with high computational capacity that can be decentralized and easily scalable. Edge computing addresses these challenges by enabling new architectures.

Whether it is data privacy and security issues, environmental concerns, or supporting equal rights, today’s users are more concerned than ever with using brands that share their values and prioritize ethical practices. As a result, having a positive brand image is key to a successful business. However, all the work you put into building a strong brand reputation can be destroyed by cyberattacks that threaten your availability, deface your site with spam, or leak sensitive customer data.

Healthcare today is in the midst of a digital transformation, with remote healthcare, online patient portals, and wearable IoT devices that enable remote patient monitoring transforming the industry. In recent years, many health companies have moved to the cloud to enable more scalability and better availability. But is the cloud capable of delivering all that’s needed for the future of healthcare?

Digital transformation has been one of the most debated terms for a while. And this debate is not in vain. Currently, any business in any industry must rely in large part on its technological infrastructure in order to stay at the forefront and compete in the market. However, not everyone knows what tools or models to choose. This often leads to maintaining legacy structures, indefinitely delaying the digital renewal process or making an investment in tools that do not meet the needs. They all mean falling behind in this very exhaustive race.

2021 has been a big year for cybersecurity; not only are attacks like ransomware and DDoS on the rise, the cost of cyberattacks to businesses is the highest it’s been since IBM began tracking it in their annual Cost of a Data Breach report. With alarming new attack trends and companies revamping their security to adapt to accelerated digital transformation, cybersecurity is becoming more important than ever.

Security analytics is one aspect of securing your network that is far too often undervalued. With it, you can leverage data analytics tools to render your security system more internally transparent, and by doing so, attain data-driven insights to anticipate and respond fluidly to both standard and novel cyber attacks.

One of Azion’s core values is innovation: the ability to develop solutions that unlock new possibilities. That’s why twice a year, members from various departments join together for Hackathon: an event where participants research, develop, and pitch new solutions for Azion’s products in one frantic 24-hour burst of creative problem-solving.

Here at Azion, we’re very excited to announce that Azion Technologies has been named a “best fit for companies that require global edge performance...” in the Forrester New Wave(TM): Edge Development Platforms.

Since its inception, the serverless model has revolutionized computing--but how has it changed security? Serverless computing platforms enable developers to build and run applications that are managed by the serverless provider, with automatic scaling and resources charged on a per-use basis. This means that the underlying infrastructure is not only provisioned and managed, but secured by the serverless provider, so developers don’t need to worry about some of the greatest security risks, such as known vulnerabilities in unpatched servers.

On September 29, 2021, Apache’s security team learned of a zero-day vulnerability (CVE 2021-41773) that attackers were exploiting to compromise Apache HTTP web servers and access sensitive files. They recommend that anyone using Apache servers 2.4.49 or 2.4.50 Linux and Windows-based servers to update to the latest version, 2.4.51, using the instructions found on the official Apache HTTP Server project site.

Load balancing solves one of the biggest problems for websites and applications: how to handle requests from large numbers of users. Guaranteeing availability through solutions that optimize consumption improves the user experience and ensures access speed, which is essential for business.

In recent years, the development of the human lifestyle has been conducted by rapid changes in technology and growing demand for digitized devices and services. That pace of change could be accelerated by new scientific discoveries, advances in technological tools (independent to the growth of knowledge, as we have limitations related to construction capacity), and the greater interest of the population in new fields such as artificial intelligence, Internet-of-Things (IoT), robotics, biotechnology, and nanotechnology. We have experienced these changes mainly since 2000 with the incorporation of communication technologies in health, engineering, economics, and transportation. Nowadays, it is almost impossible to consider it decoupled from our daily activities, whose main objective is to help us make decisions, simplify the administrative and technical processes, and improve the quality of the product or services.

DDoS attacks are one of the most common threats across today’s landscape. But to stop them from crashing or degrading your web application, you must understand what they are and how they work.

In the first blog post comparing legacy CDNs and edge platforms, we talked about their main differences and characteristics and the advantages and importance of edge platforms in the universe of content distribution. And as we've seen, using an edge platform brings so many benefits that in this blog post we'll show you how it benefits all industry sectors in practice and all the agents involved in the process: DevOps, businesses and users.

Legacy CDNs were not built to consistently serve modern applications, because the sophisticated resources and user requirements demand a state-of-the-art service that only edge platforms are able to provide. When it comes to performance, the last mile is where legacy CDNs fall short, as they cannot overcome the extra baggage of dynamic content, videos, and JavaScript, or accommodate an overwhelming number of accesses via different types of devices.

With the undeniable performance benefits of edge computing, many companies are moving to the edge. But will the same security protocols from on-prem and cloud computing transfer after migrating apps and websites?

By running Edge Functions we can easily write pieces of code that are crucial to your business, without needing to set up a whole server, security, and all those things we all are familiar with.

Your company’s ecomm experience relies on its security infrastructure to safeguard against attacks seeking to crash servers or expose sensitive client information, and on Black Friday those attacks are only going to multiply. Taking advantage of the intense traffic strain so many enterprises will face, sophisticated bots and bad actors use common attacks like DDoS to flood your system with junk connection requests until your overloaded servers are no longer able to keep up. In order to prevent that, you need to invest in a state of the art web application firewall to block attacks.

Massive cyberattacks are no longer a surprise. Hundreds of businesses have recently been affected by ransomware and ransom-based DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks – with a huge impact on industries around the world and, consequently, our daily lives.

Have you ever thought about how the Internet works underneath all the interconnected hardware? It’s a complicated process involving not just hardware, but a menagerie of systems and software. Let’s focus on two actors, the client and the server, that communicate with each other on the Internet.

In this blog post we'll show you how an edge platform benefits the technology industry in practice and all the agents involved in the process: DevOps, businesses and users.

Transforming a company is hard. So hard in fact, that major company-wide transformations are more likely to fail than succeed. And the odds are even slimmer for digital transformations. Whether you’re a traditional company trying to claw your way onto the world wide web, or a sleek digital enterprise that’s pouring every resource into staying cutting edge, major digital overhauls are a serious undertaking. Here’s the bad news: It just became even harder. Here’s the worse news: Change is inevitable and inescapable.

Developing a streaming platform or even an application that has global availability is a crucial success factor. This is especially true when it comes to delivering scalable content with minimal latency, costs, and wasted resources.

Edge computing has recently arisen as the certain and natural next step in technology and innovation to power a hyper-connected economy. However, understanding those abstract concepts, such as the edge or serverless computing, can be difficult for some organizations, especially if technology is not their core business. Considering this scenario, we've initiated a series of blog posts to explain the fundamentals of edge computing for beginners.

There is nothing better than tailoring your business with rules specially created for you and by you, according to your needs and best strategies. This lets you scale your business and improve the performance of your applications in the blink of an eye.

In this blog post we'll show you how an edge platform benefits the content and digital media industry in practice and all the agents involved in the process: DevOps, businesses and users.

Authentication is a protocol used in HTTP communication to verify that a client is who they say they are before providing the client access to a certain resource on the web. This is another security procedure in the HTTP protocol to protect users and businesses in the online environment. When authentication is done at the edge, there is a significant increase in the speed and security of the process and, consequently, in the companies' credibility and revenue.

You may have heard a lot about Ransomware lately. Ransomware is a type of malware used by hackers to compromise a system, encrypt business critical data, and force owners to pay ransom in order to unlock it.

Edtechs and educational institutions need to think about the challenges and trends that online education will bring in the coming years, and ensure that their students have an optimized and uninterrupted usage experience, guarantee of information security and full engagement during the use of learning tools.

Although Azion was founded as a one-man startup, today, it is a thriving company with more than 190 employees. This year has been one of Azion’s most exciting years yet, with the release of new products and features, an expanded global footprint, and a rapidly growing team. As we celebrate our anniversary, we would love to share with you how we got to where we are and what we have planned for the years ahead.

Data analytics tools sort through all of the data your servers and applications generate, sifting through all of the junk and white noise like a cyber bloodhound, and returning with real solid information and insights on recurring patterns that can be used for a wide variety of use cases, including troubleshooting and maintenance.

Today, it’s not enough to know your product inside and out, to have schooled yourself in the ins and outs of building and running a modern digital enterprise. Businesses looking to maximize their relevance need to exist in a near-constant state of evolution, and to do that, you need to be keeping a much closer eye on your customers and business operations.

In this blog post we'll show you how an edge platform benefits the financial industry in practice and all the agents involved in the process: DevOps, businesses and users.

A conditional request is an important feature of the HTTP protocol, as it allows the manipulation of the response that the server will send according to what the client wants. This means convenience and agility in HTTP communications.

Larger and more widespread than ever, DDoS attacks continue to make news headlines and wreak havoc on digital businesses across many different industries and geographical locations. This seemingly permanent change to the threat landscape has sent a clear message to business owners and IT decision makers: no one is safe from DDoS attacks.

In this blog post we'll show you how an edge platform benefits the retail industry in practice and all the agents involved in the process: DevOps, businesses and users.

Right now, in the months before Black Friday, it is particularly vital for e-commerces wishing to stay competitive to ensure that they’ve done everything in their power to ready their system for the incoming flood of online purchases. That can include the piecemeal replacement of outdated tools in key areas like load balancing and caching, but if you’re looking for a more holistic approach to overhauling your system, this may be the perfect time to move your data to the edge, just in time to take advantage of it’s low latency power this holiday season.

With security increasingly becoming more important, as well as regulatory requirements around privacy and data collection, it's more important than ever to build insights around your data.

What if Education and Technology could converge, resulting in only one thing? The name of this fusion would be: EdTech! Actually, this has already happened, and it is precisely this junction and its evolution over the years that we're going to discuss in this text.

Having a site or application outage on Black Friday is every e-commerce owner’s worst nightmare. E-commerce is notorious for it’s razor-thin profit margins, making these major holiday shopping days not only important, but critical to the success of retailers’ apps and websites. On average, online stores generate 300% more during the holiday weekend than other weekends in November, and according to Adobe Analytics, spend in 2021 reached 12 million per minute during the day’s peak hour. And while these gains are a boon to most retailers, those that aren’t prepared for the extra traffic stand will suffer a huge loss in profits.

A company lives and dies based on the rapport it manages to achieve with its customers, and in the impersonal world of the internet, you can’t achieve that with a handshake and a smile. Your website and web presence is the digital face of your company, and if any aspect of it is ill-conceived or poorly optimized, far too many customers aren’t going to be able to see past the rough exterior to the great product offering underneath.

If you’re looking to quickly and easily build out the functionality of your website, or if you’re new to development, REST APIs are a great place to start. By allowing different applications and application components to interact with each other, APIs save developers the trouble of writing custom code from scratch. This makes them an almost indispensable tool for programming.

The agriculture sector has undergone profound changes. The concept of smart farming is the next step in the modernization of rural labor and production and an ongoing process in agriculture’s digital revolution. Our goal is to help your agribusiness to meet the demands of the modern world efficiently, sustainably and without harming your company.

Observability has so many benefits, not just for DevOps, but for businesses as well, that in this blog post we're going deeper into the advantages of it: save effort, time, and money.

Cloud computing or edge computing? Comparing these two computing models is very common, especially after 2020 when edge computing became more mainstream among large companies and edge platforms went to great lengths in making the onboarding and migration process easier. With increasing adoption by companies focused on improving user experience, efficiency and time-to-market while reducing their IT operational costs, and powered by a rising number of professionals fluent in edge-based technologies, industries across the world accelerated their digital transformation plans.

It’s common to see websites, whether for small online stores, news outlets or government portals, going down due to excess traffic. This may happen because of sudden unexpected success – in the case of ticket sales or new video game launches – but, more often than not, overwhelming website visits are caused by criminal DDoS attacks.

Observability is a fundamental and extremely powerful practice for dealing with distributed and increasingly dynamic and complex systems. This is because observability is able to provide a holistic view of a system and allow you to determine when, why and how an atypical event happened, in addition to enabling the prevention of incidents.

This post will provide you with an introduction to data streaming, and the design philosophy that it supports, and hopefully show you the importance of selecting a data streaming service that can properly support your system.

Our main goal is to ensure efficient bot management closest to end users, leveraging the security, performance and resiliency of the Azion platform, combined with a state-of-the-art bot mitigation solution in Radware, fully equipped to detect and block the most aggressive and sophisticated automated attacks.

If you visited a business that shut down during operating hours, had long wait times, and constantly advertised irrelevant services, would you return? Probably not--so why risk the same user experience for your customers? The more time users spend online, the more important it is to ensure your digital business is as personalized and performant as possible, requiring powerful computing capabilities located as close as possible to end users. That’s why today’s biggest companies are replacing their CDNs with edge computing: a new type of distributed infrastructure designed for the modern Internet.

After a long period of uncertainty, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, in which retailers and e-commerce were forced to adopt new digital initiatives, the so-called "new normal" brought with it new challenges for this industry, such as the exponential increase in online business, higher advertising costs, high traffic spikes, and threats to the security of your applications.

Caching is basically the storage and reuse of frequently accessed resources on web pages. As the storage is done in a place of quick access, navigation is faster, which also improves the performance of websites and applications. That's why HTTP Caching is an essential tool for businesses that want to optimize the user experience and, consequently, increase their revenue.

Did you know that only 48% of current internet traffic is human? That's right, more than half of internet traffic is currently generated by robots, divided between good and bad bots.

Here, we will talk about the results of small actions in the optimization of the number of used resources, leading to an expressively better load time of more than 900 pages under our domain.

A website without images would be unthinkable in today’s Internet. Not only are images necessary to create beautifully designed web pages, they have been found to drive conversions, social sharing, and user engagement. But the time and resources required to transfer photos, logos, artwork, and even some text to create the full composition of the web page is so intensive that images may seem less like an asset and more like a liability. That’s why image processing is crucial to the success of any digital business—and can mean the difference between whether your users find themselves looking at a crisp, colorful website versus a fragmented page of placeholders or a blank loading screen.

As part of our ongoing commitment to simplify the process of building and running applications at the edge, Azion is pleased to announce changes to Edge Application that will make deployment easier and more flexible. Starting today, we have expanded port access for Edge Application.

As online users’ appetite for video content increases, digital businesses are becoming more reliant on video streaming. Faced with stiff competition for clicks and views, businesses are working hard to develop the best possible video content. But even the most compelling videos may be abandoned or ignored by users as a result of performance hiccups like slow load time, playback errors, and constant buffering. To ensure the hard work spent generating amazing content isn’t wasted, website and application owners must know the ins and outs of video streaming.

Who has never been afraid to put their credit card details on a website? I have and I guess you have felt that way before, too. Having this thought is, without a doubt, something very common in our lives, since almost everything today can be done in the virtual world – a situation that became even more evident during the Covid-19 pandemic.

As more companies embrace digital initiatives, businesses must work hard to not only find an audience for their site, but keep users engaged and interested. However, competing for clicks is becoming increasingly challenging, leaving little room for poor performance in speed and SEO and furthering the importance of social media in driving traffic and gaining conversions. That’s why tools like static site generation (SSG) and server-side rendering (SSR) are gaining (or in the case of SSR, regaining) popularity as a way to optimize performance, SEO, social media sharing, and other business drivers.

Low latency and security are both crucial for finance apps. Unfortunately, some of the measures designed to secure applications can negatively impact performance, resulting in a tradeoff that financial companies can’t afford to make. That’s why Azion’s Edge Platform is not only designed to maximize performance, but deliver robust protection for applications deployed at the edge.

With the exponential growth of Azion, we had to find a way to make these web content processes easier and make the monitoring of this scale possible.

The exponential growth of e-commerce in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic, has led to an explosion in online shopping. The need to stay at home has changed routines and habits, not only for living, but also shopping.

From learning management systems like Blackboard and Canvas to smart classrooms and educational toys, schools are increasingly incorporating technology into their daily practices. In 2020, these efforts reached new heights as schools across the world embraced remote learning to curb the spread of Covid-19.

Have you ever thought about how many times a day you visit a website? This is so common in our lives that it wouldn't be a stretch to say that, for some people, the Internet is as essential as the air we breathe. And in that short period of time between typing the URL (Uniform Resource Locator), the website's address, and the page actually appearing on your screen, some things happen during this process – and one of them is the execution of the HTTP protocol.

Vendor Lock-In. Sounds scary, right? Vendor Lock-In is a term for the concern expressed by many enterprises moving their data to cloud networks that they are being “locked-in” to the cloud platform hosting. Cloud computing is an incredibly competitive industry, and giants like AWS and Azure don’t really want to share their customers with their peers.

Website fault-tolerance is critical. Your website is more than just a series of pretty pages. It’s a bridge, connecting your enterprise to all of your customers, and to all of those visitors who could turn into customers if given the chance. Because this bridge plays such a vital role for you, every aspect of it can and should be optimized to improve the visitor experience.

Every website lives and dies by its speed. A fast website is invisible to its users, allowing them to conduct their business smoothly and satisfactorily. Anything less than instant connections jolts the customer out of their transactions, making them painfully aware of the time it takes to navigate from page to page. Optimizing your website connection times should be a top priority.

If you’re looking for something to celebrate this Earth Day, consider this: despite steady increases in Internet-connected devices and data consumption, green computing initiatives across the technology sector have managed to prevent a corresponding rise in energy consumption. But that doesn’t mean companies should stop doing their part to reduce their CO2 footprint. On the contrary, as new technologies continue to enable more connectivity than ever, it’s increasingly important for businesses to offset and drastically reduce their resource use through green computing initiatives.

As e-commerce becomes an increasingly popular way for consumers to shop, businesses must find new and innovative ways to improve their sites in order to remain competitive. By providing speed, increased availability, real-time analytics, and security in the last mile, edge computing can give retailers a competitive advantage. This blog post will examine the benefits of edge computing and how it can be used to deliver three key needs for e-commerce businesses: high performance, custom experiences, and building trust with customers.

As new technologies like 5G and edge computing steadily move us toward the Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterized by automation, robotics, and machine learning, the need for real-time data processing is becoming increasingly important. From businesses that rely on Big Data to glean customer insights to IoT applications that leverage machine-learning and AI, we are generating a torrent of data—much of which must be instantly analyzed and acted upon to ensure its relevance.

Customer data moves back and forth all the time, and although the forms of virtual interaction have diversified, security when protecting this data has not always been enough. Since companies are increasingly building cloud-based applications with SaaS, security must also evolve to keep pace with this modernization.

Over twenty years since the term “Internet of Things,” or IoT, was coined, the IoT is now a mature ecosystem poised to take a big leap forward as a result of 5G and edge computing. IoT applications are expanding into mission-critical, ultra-low latency, and high-density use cases across industries. According to forecasts by IDC, the number of connected IoT devices will grow to 55.7 billion by 2025.

As part of our official release of JavaScript support for Edge Functions, we’ve rounded up and summarized past blog posts on Edge Computing and Edge Functions. This primer will give readers a conceptual view of how our edge platform is set up and how Edge Functions work. In addition, it covers Edge Functions' attributes and features, discusses its key benefits, and describes the underlying technologies that help to make it great.

One of the key advantages of serverless is that much of the complexity of development is abstracted away, enabling developers to focus on what matters most: crafting the best possible functionality and user experience. However, from time to time, we at Azion like to share with our readers some of the techniques we use under the hood to deliver the best possible performance, security, cost-efficiency, and resource use. Foremost among these tools is Google’s V8 Engine. The V8 Engine is embedded in our core technology, Azion Cells, and used under the hood of our new serverless computing product, Edge Functions, which is now available with JavaScript support.

The history of JavaScript is, in many ways, the history of the modern Internet. Anyone who remembers the static, clunky, and slow-loading web pages of the early Internet—or even caught a glimpse of them via the Wayback Machine—has a sense of just how much web development has evolved since the 1990s. Interactive elements such as animation, fillable forms, and even the ability to scroll through articles like this one are largely due to the rise of JavaScript—a programming language that was initially developed in 10 days and conceived as a “sidekick” to Java.

From their emergence in the late 1990s, content delivery networks, or CDNs, have been instrumental in reducing Internet bottlenecks and speeding delivery by caching content close to end users. However, the Internet of today is very different from the Internet of the 1990s; as a result, today’s site and application owners need CDNs capable of providing more services, processing more requests, and quickly delivering high-resolution images, video streaming, and dynamic content to a wide variety of devices.

Collaborative work is essential in all communities and sectors. Greater diversity in these creative processes enhances the quality of the final product, since different perspectives on the same project result in greater scope of vision and increase the credibility of any production.

Since their emergence in the 1990s, CDNs have been touted as a solution for reducing latency and site availability—factors that have a direct impact on websites’ bottom line. According to Deloitte’s 2020 report Milliseconds Make Millions, even a .1s reduction in latency increases retail conversions by 8.4%, average order value by 9.2%, bounce rate by 5.7%, and customer engagement by 5.2%.

By providing managed resources and only charging for what is used, serverless enables companies to get more serving resources for their money. This post will provide a beginner’s look at serverless computing, from its evolution, benefits, and implications for enterprises to a look at how Azion’s Edge Functions brings serverless computing to the edge.

Serverless computing provides a cost-effective way for companies to leverage the power of edge computing by eliminating upfront fees and outsourcing the cost of operating and maintaining servers to cloud providers. Not only does serverless computing reduce capital expenditures and maintenance costs, performing serverless workloads at the edge has significant long-term cost advantages as a result of the reduced distance data has to travel, necessitating less bandwidth and computational power than processing in cloud providers’ centralized data centers.

In past years, serverless and edge computing have quickly risen to the forefront of many technological discussions, due to the widespread adoption of microservices, the emergence of 5G, and the ever-increasing demand for better user experiences. However, despite all the buzz and interest around serverless and edge computing, the concept still remains unclear to newcomers and IT professionals alike.

Web Application Firewalls, or WAFs, are a key component of modern web security. According to Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Incident Report, over 80% of attacks last year targeted web applications--an unsurprising statistic given the ever-increasing size of modern applications’ attack surface. However, not all WAFs are created equal. As both cyber attacks and web applications become more and more complex, WAFs must use increasingly sophisticated techniques to secure applications--and to ensure that protection does not come at the expense of performance.

The need for agile applications, on-demand scalability, high performance, and round-the-clock availability have all driven increased adoption of cloud computing, Edge Computing, and serverless architecture. Despite the benefits of these technologies, some companies are still hesitant to adopt them due to the fear of vendor lock-in. Knowing how to mitigate the risk of lock-in can help companies avoid unexpected costs and complications as they migrate to the edge and the cloud.

As today’s applications grow increasingly complex through the use of microservices architecture, integration of third-party services, and deployment in edge, cloud, hybrid, and multicloud environments, application resource management becomes a challenge all on its own. Edge Orchestrator can reduce these management complexities by automating processes and providing a single pane of glass to view and control resources.

IoT devices are finding new uses in many different fields and industries, with the development of automating many aspects of life and business, where we have come up with an array of smart technologies such as factories, agriculture, grid-monitoring, oil & gas, and even the home has not escaped becoming a smart home.

Even as the pandemic wanes, ongoing changes to Internet use like 5G rollout, accelerated cloud migration, and the increased use of IoT devices are certain to impact cybersecurity and DDoS attack trends this year.

Our commitment to building a safer, more stable internet is a core value here at Azion. As our global dependence on a secure internet continues to increase, it becomes ever more critical that we safeguard against the many vulnerabilities that web infrastructure is riddled with.

The processes of designing and building software all originate from that one crucial place: the code. The writing and deployment of code is the seed from which all DevOps projects grow.

Previously in this series of posts on microservices, we discussed the features and traits necessary to next-generation applications. As 5G and Edge Computing infrastructure are built out, ultra low-latency and reliable applications and services will become increasingly common, accelerating already high user expectations for performance. In addition, with more people working, shopping, and learning online than ever, strict security measures will be needed to meet compliance requirements and ensure consumer privacy.

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.

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 about performance and efficiency of your applications.

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.

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.

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.