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.

If you’re losing users, it may be due to poor performance. This blog post will explain the Rules Engine for Edge Application, show you how to create custom rules for your business and give you examples of use cases for this product to improve your application’s performance and enhance your users’ satisfaction level.

What’s the Rules Engine Magic?

Rules Engine is designed to allow you to code conditional execution logic. With it, you can create behaviors based on conditions that best suit your business, that is: your business, your rules. And because this all happens at Azion Edge Nodes, your rules stay close to the end users, which improves your application’s performance and throughput, leveraging your business and improving users’ experience significantly.

According to Appdynamics’ blog post The App Attention Index 2019: The Era of the Digital Reflex, “when [digital] experiences fail to deliver due to an outage or performance issue, customers take notice. And this can cause irreparable damage not only to the brand, but to a business’ bottom line.” With this in mind, we can see that users are increasingly intolerant to failure and make extreme decisions, such as going with the competition, spreading negative experiences around the web and the like.

With Rules Engine, you can map a range of events and define specific parameters to execute desired outcomes, thus transferring the business logic directly into your application. This way, you increase customer retention rates, avoiding dropouts due to connection problems or failures in your application.

Using the Real-Time Manager, Azion’s Control Panel, you can create your own rules through the Rules Engine of our Edge Application or via the Rules Engine API which enables you to create, retrieve, remove or update existing settings.

Use Cases

Customizing the user experience with criteria and behaviors specific to your business can increase your profitability by avoiding wasted resources and increasing your possibilities. According to the Deloitte study Milliseconds make millions, “Google’s user performance data shows that even the smallest fraction of a second in page load can change customer focus and interaction”. In other words, in today’s hyperconnected world, there is a need for end-to-end optimization as consumers prioritize flawless experiences. With Azion, you can deliver better latency with logic that meets your business strategies right next to your users.

The Rules Engine for Edge Application enables you to:

• improve your applications’ latency and performance by setting up logic to optimize delivery closer to the end user;
• enable cookie forwarding, headers handling, cache control, rewrite, redirect, and many other features directly from the Edge;
• use multiple complex criteria capable of considering geolocation, headers, and other HTTP fields, with the power of regular expressions and Boolean logic (AND/OR);
• create rules that deliver the same application from many different origins, including serverless capability;
• bring your business logic to the edge, reducing needless requests to your origin;
• use specific behaviors to segment the delivery of large objects into 1MB slices, if supported by the origin. With slicing, you can begin delivering content to the user even before the file is fully transmitted from the origin to the edge node.

To start building your own custom rules, just create an edge application through our platform. To create and configure your first edge application, follow the first steps.

How Rules Engine works

After following the first steps to create your edge application, simply configure and start creating rules according to the specifications you want for your business strategy. You can either create rules for the Request Phase or the Response Phase. Learn details here.

See the step-by-step instructions below on how to set up the rules for your business:

1. Go to the Real-Time Manager and access your edge application;

2. Access the Rules Engine tab to start creating the rules that best suit your business strategies;

3. When accessing the tab, you will already have a default rule. Click the New Rule button to create a new one;

   

4. In New Rule, select Request Phase or Response Phase.

In the Request phase, your user is requesting a resource from your application. In the Response Phase, you can build the rules for final handling of the response that will be delivered to your users.

5.Create your rules by choosing the criteria and the behaviors you want according to the conditions that best meet your business logic.

For a demonstration of these steps, check out this video.

As you have seen briefly, there are a range of business logic possibilities that can be set up through the Rules Engine for Edge Application. In addition, there are a variety of other possibilities that can be configured by enabling other features that we provide, such as:

• Application Acceleration: enable it to use advanced rules engine, advanced cache key, bypass cache, forward cookies or support to proxy methods (post/put/patch/delete);
• Edge Cache: create cache rules to better optimize your application, or enable Tiered Cache and gain an additional layer of cache that reduces traffic to your origin while improving performance and availability;
• Device Detection: detect the user device that is accessing your edge application and identify properties for that device.
• Edge Functions: build and run discrete functions that each serve a single purpose, and scale them independently. You can customize arguments for your predefined functions on the Functions tab, and choose the criteria to execute them on the Rules Engine tab.
• Image Processor: process images in real time to optimize user experience on your edge application;
• Load Balancer: balance traffic to your origins ensuring reliability and network congestion control.

By enabling the modules mentioned above, you can widen the scope of rules that can be created according to your requirements and strategy.

Discover how Azion can help you respond to the demands of a hyperconnected economy, anywhere in the world, and securely enrich your users’ experience. Create your free account and explore Azion’s Edge Platform today – open, programmable and extensible. Give it a try and see all the advantages in practice.

Now, tell us! What would you like to learn more about? We have a team of experts ready to talk to you.