Intelligent Internet
Top 3 takeaways – Intelligent Internet Research
Research report by Ceatro group
Awareness of Application Optimization was Limited - All interviewees were focused on fail over when they talked about the use and purpose of their two uplinks. The idea that there might be one link, at a given time, that is better for a specific application and provide a better user experience, at that time was understood but interviewees couldn't picture themselves using it regularly
2. Build Trust with Controllable, Out-of-The-Box Configurations - These interviewees welcome out-of-the-box policy configurations that they can turn on and off and configure to meet their needs. Starting from a blank slate is a lot of work.
3. Network balance is a priority - The balance of the entire network, including all the apps, is more important to them than the performance of one application. Many offered concerns that moving one application to improve that one application experience could cause ‘chaos’ in the network or make another application’s experience degrade
Intelligent Internet:
What is Intelligent Internet ?
Intelligent Internet is a feature that routes traffic on the real-time best performing uplink for business critical applications.
This feature can be configured automatically or manually where the top applications are either auto-selected from the productivity category or manually added to the list by user. Currently, the limit of number of applications to be configured is 10 (due to firmware feasibility) but the solution will likely be scalable in future.
The best performing uplink is determined by “Pathmon Testing” capability which run tests on the available uplinks using HTTP to identify jitter, latency, and packet loss and selects the best uplink.
There is also, an ability for uplink reporting to the users by visualizing the movement of an application from WAN1 to WAN2 as a live feed with explanation for the change and how it impacts the application performance. Tier is a plan for predictive insights in the future scope.
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Why do we work on this project ?
Today, MX devices use static routing and traffic steering based on the performance of pings on a given WAN link to google DNS or a custom endpoint (rather than the performance of application through the WAN link). With conventional traffic steering, an application could be experiencing poor performance through the link, but the link would still be considered the preferred link as far as ping stats to google DNS is preferred.
The current solutions like dynamic path selection or performance based routing work great for the customers who have their resources located in private data centers or in the cloud infrastructure (Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure). However, customers are moving their resources more towards cloud-based software applications. With a 35% median growth rate in SaaS applications, cloud traffic is growing at a rate of 30% annually. As customers increase traffic across networks, it is critical that their network can provide a reliable, scalable, and enforceable connection. Current traffic steering does not consider critical business applications as priorities in routing decisions.
Customers have requested performance driven routing and network optimization for applications for over the past decade. The lack of intelligent routing and traffic steering has led to losses over $60 million of opportunities
Competitors (Fortinet, Juniper) have application performance routing (APFR) available for application level routing. However, Intelligent Internet would take this one step further providing app level performance and strategic decision making for best routing performance.
What did we do ?
Requirement doc <image>
We started the project by having a walkthrough of the requirement document between the PM and the design team. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla est metus, laoreet convallis mollis vitae, ultrices in orci. Etiam ac leo quis nisi commodo mollis quis non libero.
Early research and Competitive analysis
Concept sketches and workflows
Exploratory research with Ceatro <ceatro research report>
Initial design (consolidated view) with Informal Test
Final design (Separate view)
Uplink reporting design is pending
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