This past Saturday (8/20) Kyle York, Dyn’s Chief Strategy Officer, appeared as a guest on-air with Craig Peterson for a special segment on TechTalk around the Olympics and preparing for Rio. In case you missed it live, we’ve captured some of the highlights from the segment below.
Craig: Tell us a bit about Dyn, and what the company is doing for internet performance management?
Kyle: Today, we’re really focused on cloud-based Internet Performance Management. The idea around that is, how do you get visibility and control into the infrastructure behind your websites, applications and any workloads that you as an enterprise are running on the public internet. The internet today is a highly complex environment, it’s a global audience and as you mentioned there’s a lot of volatility. We keep a very close eye on major events and what’s happening across the global internet to make sure customers can optimize traffic effectively and deliver a faster, safer, more reliable web presence.
Craig: How can I as a business get my information out faster? What are companies doing today, and what is Dyn doing to help the internet get faster?
Kyle: First of all, it’s about actually understanding your users and where they’re coming from, and making sure that you’re putting your applications and content as close to those users as possible. We take it for granted as consumers of the internet that there’s a ton of infrastructure, no different than brick-and-mortar type businesses, there’s a lot of plumbing that goes into these web properties – whether that be the network carriers, data centers, servers and hardware that lives within those data centers or cloud solutions that they might be leveraging. We don’t think about the infrastructure that goes into websites when we type in CNN.com to get the news story that we’re looking for or when purchasing shoes on Amazon.com. We don’t think about it but there’s a ton of infrastructure that’s there. What we’re trying to do is bring together the data to get a clear understanding of users and performance and overlay different analytics to give you recommendations, alerts and alarms on how it can be optimized and troubleshooted. And then in real-time we can steer internet traffic to the nearest resources to the end user to help ensure performance.
Craig: So you’re doing the steering by monitoring all of this — an analogy would it be something like Waze for instance?
Kyle: Waze is a great analogy. I’m always using Waze when I’m driving from our Manchester headquarters down to Boston or New York; I want to get there in the most optimized manner and not be sitting in congestion or traffic. I think the Olympics are a critical example of this. If you think about the Olympics happening this year in Rio and the global audiences viewing the games and then the providers streaming the games, whether it be NBC streaming live video or ESPN showing highlights or regional media priorities covering the events, it’s all about making sure you’re delivering a highly available experience. Are the websites always up and running in high congestion and volatile times? But also is it performing? You or I don’t want to wait for a video to buffer. Especially in 2016 when we’re all very impatient, it’s critical that sites can deliver. There’s no grander example than a global event like the Olympics.
Craig: You’re working with some top tier media sites to help them understand bandwidth in different countries around the world. What have you done to help companies prepare for peak performance, especially for global events like for the Olympics?
Kyle: I have so many great anecdotal stories. I can remember working with Homeaway.com, the vacation rental company, when they did a commercial during the Super Bowl a few years ago. They were so worried about being able to optimize their site for peak performance weeks leading up to when the Super Bowl ad aired; knowing they were going to drive so much traffic to the site. It’s all about providing data visibility, the ability to run real-time tests and looking at traffic in almost a lab-scenario setting to prepare for peak traffic and site overload.
We see it all the time with Twitter. Even things like when Michael Jackson died, imagine the traffic that went to Twitter’s web properties. It’s all about being able to optimize traffic flows, leverage capacity within the data centers, cloud solutions, the infrastructure behind those properties and being prepared in the event that there’s a failure. We’re trying to put that control and visibility back into our customers to help better manage their properties.
Craig: What about the average Joe company? How can Dyn help those companies?
Kyle: Here at Dyn, we work with customers of all sizes. From large scale enterprises to almost 800,000 small businesses and consumers who leverage similar technology for data analytics, traffic steering, DNS capabilities that do the same thing that a large business would do but on a smaller, more niche or perhaps vertical environment scale. We have customers of all sizes and everyone is worried about performance because more and more businesses, communication and brands are moving to the internet and we’ve become so heavily reliant on it.