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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 Computing 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 Computing 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 Azion’s Edge Functions, a FaaS solution that 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, Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) 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 low-latency applications and devices. However, despite all the buzz and interest around 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.

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 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.

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.