By Sudha Mahajan
With employees and customers scattered around the globe, organizations are distributing their applications across geographies, a practice known as geo-distribution.
Everyone expects—and deserves—an identical app experience. Spread across multiple cloud centers, geo-distributed apps promise high availability, resiliency, compliance, and performance. But when the network these apps rely on isn’t set up properly, the resulting failure can be calamitous for an enterprise.
If you don’t distribute your application and your sole data center goes down, your application is down for everyone, everywhere, creating major headaches. If that happens on a critical day, like Black Friday, the impact on brand reputation and revenue could be catastrophic.
Networking services like Azure Networking Services can aid geo-distributed apps by creating an environment to enhance reliability, cost efficiency, and edge security. With the right networking environment, these apps can form the backbone of a modern enterprise and save companies from the dilemma of performance versus cost.
Here are three top priorities for geo-distributed apps that can be satisfied with the right networking services.
1. Boost app performance and scale.
Network performance can contribute to around 60% of application programming interface (API) transaction or page load time. To enhance the performance of apps for your globally dispersed network, adopt services that cover performance benchmarking, performance routing and load balancing, and application and content acceleration.
A network traffic management service can help you route incoming traffic for high performance and availability. Such a service can increase app responsiveness by using performance routing and route network traffic based on priorities, weighted round robin, geography, and performance. The idea is to get the app as close to the user as possible—or make it feel that way.
Load-balancing network services, which can be optimized with AMD high-performance infrastructure, distribute internet and private network traffic among backend servers. They can instantly add scale to your applications.
To accelerate web-based performance, a cloud content delivery network (CDN), such as Azure Front Door, can be added to these services and combined across edge locations to perform caching of much of your JavaScript. As a result, a user can enjoy app performance comparable to an app hosted in any country, even for apps hosted across the globe, because they now connect to one of more than 100 edge sites via the internet.
2. Optimize cost.
For any application, but specifically for geo-distributed apps, data transaction and bandwidth charges can reach more than 50% of overall app costs. Optimizing your network while distributing your apps can result in major cost savings.
With the right services, you’ll need to deploy your app to only a handful of regions to boost performance globally rather than host it in each relevant region, resulting in a significant cost advantage—as much as half. Instead of deploying an app to nine regions, you may need to deploy to only three, massively cutting costs while customers experience no difference in performance.
In addition to those savings, look for competitive resource pricing and pay-as-you-go bandwidth and services. The right services will offer connection scale, egress bandwidth, and cost management. A global, scalable, and secure CDN can result in up to 80% cost savings by scaling static apps to less than 100 times.
3. Increase application security at the edge.
The edge is where you connect to the internet—typically involving hundreds of sites around the world—so boosting security at the edge is critical. Attacks are distributed. Shouldn’t the defense be distributed too?
With proper network security, you can also automate alerts, boost security at the edge, increase app availability and performance, and protect your network from common attacks.
A web application firewall can intercept bad traffic at the edge before it gets back to the data center, where it could harm your application. You’re essentially building a wall at every edge and stopping attacks there, shrinking the attack surface. That need is why hyperscalers work to enhance security at the edge while chipmakers create edge-specific infrastructure to ward off threats.
Get the best from your geo-distributed apps
Most industries rely on geo-distributed apps, with Fortune 500 companies leading the way by necessity. For those successful organizations, the right networking services ensure their apps have reliable performance, cost efficiency, and increased security. It’s well worth considering how these services could advance your enterprise.
Learn how Azure Networking Services along with AMD can help achieve your organization’s priorities for your geo-distributed apps.
Sudha Mahajan is a general manager and partner, Azure Core at Microsoft.