Also known as traffic shaping or packet shaping, traffic manipulation is one of the advanced Layer7 features that differentiates next generation Application Delivery Controllers from old, simple load balancers.
Increasingly, organisations are subscribing to the advantages of greater control and intelligence in their service delivery. As we discussed in our last blog, users can implement traffic management rules to automate a myriad of everyday routing tasks from simple HTTP redirects to much more granular and complex rules unique to individual SOA’s. Great I hear you say, a feature that can control network traffic in order to optimize network performance, accelerate applications, and deliver personalised service levels!
More control ultimately leads to more productivity, efficiency and flexibility, doesn’t it? This blog discusses implementation scenarios for the jetNEXUS flightPATH routing engine, reflecting on the business benefits and the powerful implications of such. Is there really such a thing as too much control?
Controlling Spiders
Search engine spiders, robots, Googlebots, however you like to refer to them, can be quite the virtual pest for online businesses. Whilst we appreciate that they are vital to SEO, Googlebots utilise valuable bandwidth and add load to servers when they make multiple requests, crawl sites and test forms. Importantly, content found by the bots on your website is indexed, affecting search engine ranking and quality scoring. flightPATH gives users the ability to block or control spiders, redirecting them to dedicated servers, separate from where ‘real’ users are accessing the site to avoid network slowdowns.
Sound good? Better still, flightPATH can detect Googlebots and automatically serve them different content that has been specifically designed with them in mind. So you could have pages with very clean code or less dynamic data so that they load faster. Or if you are a bit naughty you could serve Googlebots pages that are enriched with heavily searched for keywords. An increase in relevant keywords helps to boost your site’s ranking in organic search results and give you that competitive edge. Just another possibility borne out of the power of fligthPATH!
Prioritising Premium Customers for E-commerce
Many E-commerce organisations have a set of loyal users and clients that frequently revisit their site. flightPATH can log and segment these premium users based on user ID or Cookie type and set rules to service their requests in a different way. It may be that you want to serve alternative content to repeat visitors or provision them with a premium service for a faster online experience. Either way, this feature gives clients greater control in their service delivery, detecting users and managing their online experience.
Traffic Shaping to Control Spam
*Play Jaws Theme Tune here* :) ‘botnets’ are the primary source of spam today. Typically ‘botnets’ are PCs with broadband connections that have been infected with malware, allowing a remote user to control its behaviour. Zombie computers grow uncontrollably each day, primarily because domestic users have a more relaxed approach to security and anti-virus!
jetNEXUS ALB-X can help to reduce the threats from spammers, ensuring that only a manageable quantity of email traffic flows into the mail server. This makes attempts to flood the servers and bring them down more difficult.
These are just a couple of ways in which you can use this powerful routing engine. With a catalogue of pre-built rules designed to satisfy the typical requirements of the vast majority of users including block unwanted requests, rewrite user requests and fix broken URLs, it has never been easier to take control of your network.
So for which ever scenario you need to manipulate traffic you can use flightPATH – but remember it’s a powerful tool, use it wisely!
Download a free trial and test it out for yourselves: jetNEXUS ALB-X 2.0 (with flightPATH)
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