{"content":[{"text":"that can handle the packet load of multiple 100G circuits then I probably would like to have my unit make \n some 100M or so switching decisions per second. That implies that I need to design a decision system that can \n perform this lookup across a set of 1 million entries and do so in just 10 nanoseconds. This is a very challenging \n objective. By comparison the fastest available memory cycle time is a little under 1 nanosecond. However, it’s \n not quite as simple as that. If I am building such a switch element then I need to design it such that it can cope \n with the peak switching loads in that I can expect in 1, 2 or even 5 years from now. If I get it wrong and do not \n design sufficient capacity and speed, then my unit will hit obsolescence earlier and this will impose further costs \n on the network operator. If I over-design, it then I will have spent too much on state-of-the-art high-speed \n memory and my product will be far more expensive than my competitors. Every device is built with such design \n trade-offs and the useful life of these devices depends on such indeterminate factors such as the future growth \n rate of the Internet. The point is that of our networks use such equipment, and the role of the network operator \n is to constantly upgrade their switching equipment capability to keep just ahead of these demands. And means \n that it’s inevitable that sometimes they will slip up. As did Akamai evidently. We can’t just out-design this \n problem when we are sitting on the very edge of what silicon is capable of.","bbox":{"left":0.071764,"top":0.050717,"width":0.857245,"height":0.22470800000000002}},{"text":"But this is not an issue that is unique to Akami. All network service providers are chasing a similar objective, \n and from time to time all of these systems may flip over to an overload state and have a service outage. What \n was notable about this particular outage was that this outage impacted a large set of online service providers. \n The business of being the back-end service provider to online platforms is not exactly a highly populated and \n diverse business environment. In fact, there are very few enterprises that offer such services, and if any of them \n experience operation outages then the impacts are going to be highly visible.","bbox":{"left":0.071764,"top":0.291319,"width":0.857246,"height":0.09614}},{"text":"As it turned out this was not an isolated incident in June 2021. Earlier in the month we saw a set of popular \n services disappear for an hour or more. The list of impacted services included Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit, Spotify, \n the New York Times, and the BBC to name just a few. What did all these services have in common? They use \n Fastly.","bbox":{"left":0.071764,"top":0.403637,"width":0.857234,"height":0.06421300000000002}},{"text":"ABC News Report on Fastly Outage","bbox":{"left":0.132238,"top":0.659633,"width":0.253012,"height":0.01603500000000002}},{"text":"“We experienced a global outage due to an undiscovered software bug that surfaced on June 8 when it \n was triggered by a valid customer configuration change. We detected the disruption within one minute, \n then identified and isolated the cause, and disabled the configuration. Within 49 minutes, 95% of our \n network was operating as normal. This outage was broad and severe, and we’re truly sorry for the impact \n to our customers and everyone who relies on them.” \n https://www.fastly.com/blog/summary-of-june-8-outage","bbox":{"left":0.132238,"top":0.691561,"width":0.796768,"height":0.09614}},{"text":"Again, this was not an attack. It was more in the nature of a ticking time bomb where a particular customer \n configuration setting could trigger a failure in the shared CDN platform. And all that needed to happen was \n for a customer to stumble on that particular configuration setting and the system would fail.","bbox":{"left":0.071764,"top":0.819844,"width":0.857237,"height":0.04824799999999996}},{"text":"Fastly is built on a configuration management platform called “Varnish”. As Fastly reports:","bbox":{"left":0.071764,"top":0.883985,"width":0.70964,"height":0.01603500000000002}},{"text":"Page 2","bbox":{"left":0.82993,"top":0.94214,"width":0.051439000000000124,"height":0.01603500000000002}}],"images_bbox":[{"left":0.132557,"top":0.483923,"width":0.670391,"height":0.175379}],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[{"left":0.132557,"top":0.483923,"width":0.670391,"height":0.175379}]}