We are very excited to announce a powerful new Pulsar capability: Pulsar Stabilization.
The new Stabilization mode allows Pulsar to optimize traffic performance while keeping the distribution of traffic as stable as possible. This addresses a major pain point both customers and CDN providers have with traditional performance based routing: when two or more CDNs or data centers have roughly equal performance, customer traffic can rapidly swing back and forth between them.
Stabilization allows our customers to optimize performance while factoring in other key considerations for their business such as stability, cost and commit management. The solution that we’ve built to enhance traffic routing for these different use cases is fully integrated with the Filter Chain you already know and love. Rather than always picking the strictly best performing answer, the Pulsar Stabilization Filter allows preceding Filters to sort and choose between answers that Pulsar decides are performing "good enough” based off performance thresholds that you decide.
Below are some of the exciting new use cases you can solve for with Pulsar Stabilization.
Ensure a high performance bar AND…
… Distribute traffic consistently
Send traffic to your multi-CDN and cloud infrastructure in a way that delivers performance gains for your end users while avoiding excessive switching from one CDN to the other by treating answers within a certain tolerance the same way. If you were to employ two CDNs, and one was only slightly faster, you might prefer to balance traffic across both of them in a particular region rather than having all of your traffic swing towards the slightly faster one.
No one likes jitter and flapping. We know that traffic stability and predictability ensures better relationships with your CDN or cloud partners. Stabilizing your traffic provides you with the added bonus of being able to more reliably predict and control your monthly CDN spend.
… Preference one CDN over another
Easily configure a policy that will globally or regionally distribute traffic across 2 (or more) CDNs according to your requirements (say 70% to one, 30% to the other), unless one is experiencing 50ms or higher latency than the other, in which case the better performing one will get the traffic.
… Optimize for low spend
Statically or dynamically feed cost information for each of your CDNs, cloud or other end points and then steer traffic according to your performance and cost requirements. For example, you can set the policy to choose the lowest cost CDN unless the performance of that CDN falls below a threshold.
… Hit minimum CDN commits
Many CDNs negotiate minimum CDN commit targets for better pricing. When performance is within your determined threshold, you can make sure that traffic is being distributed so as to also optimize for hitting your minimum CDN commits. As you approach or hit your CDN contract limit, the Filter Chain will start shifting traffic to other CDNs that are performing within your requirements. Conversely, use this feature to send more traffic to a CDN where you have spare, unused capacity in your contract.
… Maintain sticky traffic routing for your users
Send returning users to the same CDN/cloud. From a performance and cost perspective, it is better to send a user to the CDN they were last directed to, even if another CDN is performing better. That is because their specific content is more likely to be in the cache. Our new Pulsar controls combined with our “Sticky Filters” make it easy to set up Filter Chain logic to make that happen, boosting cache hit percentages whether you are prioritizing based on performance, cost or other priorities.
… So much more
These new capabilities are both powerful and easy to use, in keeping with NS1s design objectives which we’ve maintained since we first launched our next-gen DNS technologies.
The great thing is that it really is 100% integrated with all of our Filter Chains. Talk to one of our Solutions Engineers to help you determine the best Filter Chain configuration for you.
Interested in learning more about Multicloud or MultiCDN strategy?
If you have a distributed infrastructure or are laying the groundwork to introduce a more distributed architecture for your applications, please take a look at the ways our Managed DNS service with Pulsar can give you the tools to make everything “just work better” for your users and your business. it is now easier than ever to balance your traffic to the best infrastructure resources as conditions change on the internet and in your infrastructure, in real time all the time.
Schedule a demo with one of our Solutions Engineers.
For Additional Information:
Pulsar Stabilization Knowledge Base
NS1 Solution for Implementing a Multi-CDN Strategy
Case Study: Read How Magnetic Media Gained 70% Performance Improvement with Pulsar