Tech innovator Snapt helps retailers stay online during the most important sales day of the year by ensuring that websites, applications, and services remain online, secure, and function as fast as possible. San Francisco, Cal. — With the most significant sales of the year happening right after Thanksgiving, Black Friday is the most critical day in the holiday shopping season for retailers. As retail businesses increasingly move focus to online sales, all parts of the sales process must function correctly during the year's biggest sales event—including online offerings. However, Black Fridays past have seen even large retailers like Costco, J.Crew, Walmart, and Lululemon experience issues with their online retail websites, unprepared to meet the surge of online traffic.

What's the most shocking thing about Facebook Group's outage, which took Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp offline on October 4, 2021? The millions of missed messages? That it took around seven hours to identify and resolve the problem? The estimated $50 billion wiped off Facebook's value? No, the most shocking thing is that it took until now for this to happen.

On Tuesday, June 8th, 2021 at 09:47 UTC, Fastly's Content Delivery Network (CDN) went down. Sites affected included Reddit, eBay, Twitch, GOV.UK, Pinterest, and Vimeo. Some were affected in smaller ways - Twitter emojis were no longer visible, for example.

Our first blog of this series outlined the various challenges posed to DevOps and IT leaders resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. In this blog we take a closer look at designing for resilience using a Cloud-N disaster recovery and mitigation strategy.

Our first blog of this series outlined the various challenges posed to DevOps and IT leaders resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. In this blog we take a closer look at designing distributed systems for digital healthcare.

Picture this: you have just completed a brand new installation of a server (Windows Server, Ubuntu, etc.) where you are going to deploy your organization's web portal. You need to ensure this service stays online and protected from bad actors.

If you're considering whether you can afford running more than one server for your business, you're likely to discover that you can't afford not to. Even with the additional operational expenses, you’ll be better off having redundant servers because redundancy minimizes downtime for your critical applications and reduces the costs incurred by outages, which can be huge. The price of downtime is always too high for any business. Like it or not, IT downtime is a fact of life. Systems fail. Outages happen. The failure rate of cloud servers is roughly 2% annually, for example. The larger the installation, the more frequently outages will occur. The best way to deal with these inevitable worst-case scenarios is to be prepared and minimize the downtime as much as possible.

It’s increasingly common for online businesses to distribute web infrastructure across multiple data centers, or clouds, located in different regions and even in other countries. Rather than putting all their eggs in one cloud basket, deploying in multiple sites ensures web services stay up and running while also improving the performance of those services. Ever wonder how Amazon or Google can serve up requested content in mere seconds to users all over the globe? Part of the reason is that their infrastructure is globally distributed so that they can store and process content closer to where their customers are.

Dave Blakey recently stated in another blog post (CDNs vs ADCs: What are the differences?) that “No on-premise ADC can truly prevent a DDoS attack!” and he’s exactly right, but what is a DDoS attack and how does it differ from a DoS attack?