Global Traffic Management
Business continuity with a cloud-based intelligent traffic manager
everyone expects instant gratification and a secure, dynamic experiences
Global Traffic Management is a transversal solution capable of making visible every detail of traffic on your web applications. With this tool you can optimize response times, monitor and allocate resources as well as adjusting offload to the Akamai network.
Global Traffic Management leverages the Akamai Intelligent PlatformTM to apply an Internet-centric approach to global load balancing and real-time failover. Designed to ensure high availability and responsiveness to user requests, Global Traffic Management is a fully fault-tolerant and cloud-based solution — unlike traditional hardware-based solutions that reside within the data center. It makes intelligent routing decisions based on real-time data center performance health and global Internet traffic conditions, ensuring that user requests are delivered via the best possible Internet route for that user, in that moment.
BENEFITS TO YOUR BUSINESS
- Reduce IT cost and complexity by offloading to the Akamai Intelligent Platform™ and standardizing optimization across all applications
- Improve response time and mitigate traffic impact by addressing real-time Internet conditions
- Optimize site availability so users can always reach your applications and site by improving load balancing
- Modify web traffic allocation and new property set-up dynamically via greater network visibility and control
- Increase service availability and avoid potential security threats with built-in reliability and redundancy
AUDI AG views Akamai as a scalable extension to the infrastructure of our internal web center and offers us a quality of web performance which we would not be able to achieve by our own means.
— Christian R, Audi AG Manager of IT Engineering, Urban Outfitters, Inc.
Global Traffic Management
Everyone connected to your enterprise expects instant gratification and a secure, dynamic experience every time they access your website or application, no matter where they are or what device they’re using. To meet the expectations of the faster forward world and capture its opportunities, IT organizations must aim for zero downtime while ensuring the consistently optimal response times that deliver the best online experiences.
Achieving high application availability and optimal online response times can involve a variety of site implementation strategies including geographically diverse data centers and redundant network architectures and components. Traditional hardware load balancing appliances alone can fall short, as they do not account for Internet bottlenecks that can affect an end user’s ability to connect to an appropriate data center.
What is Global Traffic Management
Global Traffic Management Management is designed so that Internet users can more reliably get to your websites or any other IP application. It applies an Internet-centric approach to global load balancing to provide high site availability and responsiveness to online user requests. Unlike traditional hardware-based solutions that reside within the data center, Akamai’s Global Traffic Management service is a fault-tolerant solution that makes intelligent routing decisions based on real-time data center performance health and global Internet conditions to route online user requests to the most appropriate data center using an optimized Internet route for that user at that moment. It’s the only load balancing solution that leverages the scale and speed of the global Akamai Intelligent Platform™.
How it Works
Akamai monitors application availability through widely-deployed points-of-presence to capture Internet traffic conditions relative to the customer’s data centers. Based on these conditions, customer-specific policy rules are evaluated against real-time Internet traffic conditions. Backed by a 100% SLA, you can be assured that Akamai will direct traffic to a live data center, and depending on the policy rules, to the closest or to a high performance one.
- A user requests a website or application, and his/her browser requests the site’s IP address from the local name server
- Using standard DNS resolution, the local name server requests the IP address from the site’s authoritative name server
- The name server replies with a CNAME alias to Akamai’s name servers
- Using standard DNS resolution, the local name server requests from the Akamai name server an optimized route, based on your policy rules, to send the user to
- The Akamai name servers reply with the list of IP addresses for web servers at an optimal site
- The local name server sends one IP address to the user’s browser and the user is connected transparently to the requested website
Service Variations
- GTM Standard includes:
- Failover — directs requests to an alternate location when there is a failure at the primary site. The Failover solution can be used across disparate network carriers
- IP Intelligence — directs requests to a data center based on geographic or IP rules
- Weighted — directs requests to data centers based on preset percentage splits
- Any combination of the above
- GTM Premier includes:
- Every capability in GTM Standard
- Policy rules that trade off between availability and performance
- Load feedback — based on real time communication with the customer’s premises, load policies can be modified depending on actual data centers’ performance
Global Traffic Management can also be combined with any Akamai delivery or acceleration service to accelerate the delivery of dynamic content.
