Archive for Scale

Using real apps to test billing and charging on 4G/LTE networks

The hype, and in many cases concern around DPI has always been strong. It has triggered provocative debate on the Internet around privacy, end user rights, the role of the operator, and the extent to which they can monitor what applications we send and receive on the Internet.

The truth is that DPI isn’t just an emerging technology; it’s actually a reality, showing up on traditional fixed line networks, enterprise networks and most recently on mobile networks. Recently, Telefonica announced the deployment of Sandvine’s network policy control solutions to provide visibility across the network for some 250 million subscribers across 20 countries.

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Driving Real Application Traffic Through Junosphere Virtual Infrastructure

Today, Juniper announced Junosphere™ Lab, an innovative on-demand service that gives service providers and enterprises immediate and low cost access to a virtualized environment for designing and testing networks. Very cool stuff – leveraging the power of the cloud and helping customers dramatically reduce their TCO while accelerating the time to model networks.

Real Traffic in a Virtual Environment

So when you spin up a network environment and model a production topology, you’ll then need a way to create realistic application traffic to understand its impact across the network. That’s where we come in.

Mu Studio Performance has been integrated into the Junosphere Lab so you can just as easily spin up (and tear down) virtual instances of our performance testing solution to quickly and accurately recreate a mix of applications that represent the production environment – that is, real users on real devices, running real applications.

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Speed Limit of PaaS – 64K TCP Ports

PaaS providers like Heroku, CloudFoundry, RedHat and Joyent are all supporting node.js apps that you can simply git push and scale out. node.js is unlike anything you’ve encountered before. As Ryan Dahl puts it:

node.js helps you maintain connections

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Mu App Quadrant #2 – Netflix on iPhone & iPad Impacts Operator Networks More than on Android Devices

In our first edition of the Mu App Quadrant, we compared the run-time aspects of the most popular desktop video applications – Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and Amazon Video on Demand – and showed that Netflix is not particularly friendly to both Consumers and Operators.

It’s not just the apps – devices matter too!
Operators continue to struggle with the unpredictable growth of applications and the devices used to access them. With millions of people running applications like Netflix, spikes can occur on the network which often leads to disruption of other applications and services.

Recently, Korea Telecom suffered a network outage where a third-party app took the voice-call success rate down to a mere 10% because the signaling traffic generated by the app overloaded its network.
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Creating an Application Mix to Model the Production Network

Video and P2P Rule!
The traffic making up today’s networks is in a rapid state of flux. Just last week Sandvine, in their Spring 2011 Global Phenomena Report, noted that real-time entertainment continues to increase, and within North America represents almost 50% of peak fixed access traffic (much of this of course is due to Netflix). P2P traffic also continues to carve out a sizeable piece of the pie at around 20%. The rest is a mix of voice, business apps, games, Facebook and chat.

What’s interesting though is that the relative amount of traffic that isn’t application-level is tiny – all the stuff that makes networks run like DNS, ICMP, BGP and so on.

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Mu App Quadrant #1 – Not all video streaming apps are created equal…

There’s been a lot of debate recently about the impact of video apps on the network. According to Nielsen, Netflix alone now accounts for 20% of downstream traffic during peak times in the United States. In a previous blog Kowsik explained the behind-the-scenes interactions that are happening unbeknownst to you when you watch a Netflix movie. So that got us thinking – are all the popular video apps as network-intensive as Netflix? Are some video apps more user-friendly with their bandwidth consumption than others? Are some video apps more operator-friendly with their consumption of networking resources?

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Mommy, Netflix is eating my firewall!

Personally, as a consumer, I love Netflix, but it hasn’t been the darling of service providers and ISP’s lately. You can read about the Canadian ISP saga here. Our imminent next release of Mu Studio will enable our customers to recreate 1,000,000 concurrent Netflix users watching a movie, so they can understand the impact of their application aware networks. One thing is pretty clear: compared to YouTube, Netflix inflicts so much more pain on the network. Credit for this blog goes to Yuri who did all the reverse engineering. And he’s signed up to Netflix to watch movies during work for “research” purposes. :)

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blitz.io: Taking the sting out of load and performance testing

In the past few weeks of blitz.io, we’ve had our users blitz their location-aware iPhone apps, PHP sites, couch and node.js apps, Heroku deployments, JSON/XML RESTful-ness and just having fun scaling out their app in a very agile, iterative way. Still, there’s an element of having to type the cURL-ish line on the blitz bar. While this dramatically cuts down on the cost of test creation, we thought we’ll simplify this one more step and bring load and performance testing right into your app!

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blitz.io: The [long] night before an iPhone app launch

We’d been helping out a blitz.io customer late into the night and here’s what we were up against. A spanking new iPhone app was going live the next day. It was expected to support 100,000 concurrent users with cool new location-aware awesomeness (can’t really talk about it, sorry!). The back-end architecture had a load balancer, multiple web servers, Fast-CGI scripts, replicated MySQL databases, memcached and yet we just couldn’t get past a few thousand concurrent users. This blog is about insights into performance tuning and bottlenecks uncovered by using blitz.io to load test their application.

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Testing for Today’s Most Popular Apps…The Holy Grail of Testing?

I’ve been in the testing business for many years now and I’ve come across a lot of grandiose claims by test tool vendors with regards to features and capabilities that just sound too good to be true. And in many cases, they are.

When it comes to today’s world of smartphones and tablets and the explosive growth of web and mobile applications, it’s mind-blowing to see the sheer quantity of apps out there. If you look at the number of apps available today on just three of the leading app stores (Apple, Android and Facebook), there’s over a million applications, with tens of thousands of new ones every single month. Full Post »

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