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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Mu App Quadrant #3 – Skype Voice on Mac (OS X) Expends at Least 28% More for Consumers and Operator Networks than on Other Devices

In the previous versions of the Mu App Quadrant we first compared the most popular video services, and then specifically focused on Netflix across multiple endpoints. Now, in this third edition we have looked at Skype. Not only is it one of the most popular voice apps on the internet with over 30 million users online at peak times, it’s also one of the biggest bandwidth guzzlers, due in part to the P2P nature of its architecture.

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blitz.io: Geo-located Traceroutes with Heroku, AWS and CouchDB

Okay, not the greatest, ground-breaking, coolest, earth-shattering feature ever. Let’s just get that out of the way. But, in the process of troubleshooting various latency issues for our customers, we found ourselves logging on to various EC2 instances of blitz.io to run traceroutes to our users sites/apps to diagnose problems. We are developers, hanging out in TextMate, vim and our terminals and the ability to take a local Unix command and run it remotely while staying in our zone (shell) was important. So …

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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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Ensuring the Accuracy of the Mu TestCloud Application Tests

In a previous blog I discussed how we had started to build out the test content for different kinds of applications across categories like P2P, video, chat and social media in our Mu TestCloud store. Fast-forward to today, and we’ve now got well over 2,000 tests, with coverage for hundreds of different apps. We’ve also got lots of customers who are actively using these ready-to-run tests for a wide range of use-cases – everything from verifying application detection signatures to validating application policies, as well as billing and charging.

But regardless of their domain, there are two common questions that customers are curious to understand:

1. How do we select the applications in the first place?
2. How do we ensure the accuracy of the tests?

So for this blog I’m going to give you a behind-the-scenes view into our test content creation process.

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blitz.io is now available as a CloudFlare app!

We are super excited to bring blitz.io to CloudFlare‘s users. We’ve been slow rolling this over the course of the week and it has been pretty amazing to see CloudFlare users using blitz.io against their direct domain/origin server to see the benefits of performance and security provided by CloudFlare. CloudFlare is now the 7th blitz.io partner, in a growing list of ecosystem partnerships. In the era of PaaS, DevOps and Continuous Deployment, blitz.io makes load and performance testing a fun sport with no scripting and affordable self-service, utility pricing.

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Help CouchDB break the C10K barrier

Over the weekend, I was experimenting with CouchDB to see if it can pass the C10K barrier. Some of the performance optimizations I made along the way are really OS-level optimizations that affect MochiWeb (erlang web server) and fairly well documented in many blogs. This one by @metabrew in particular is a pretty good read, since it focuses on Erlang and MochiWeb. While I am a performance junkie, I am not an Erlang hacker. So this is a call for help to the CouchDB hackers for recommendations on scaling out CouchDB.

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blitz.io – Path-finding with CouchDB

blitz.io went down for a short duration yesterday morning. It was an interesting day uncovering and identifying issues we hadn’t encountered before with multi-region CouchDB clusters that are doing multi-master continuous replication. In a lot of ways, we are path-finding and pushing CouchDB to its limits given that we are a write-heavy app. In the process, we are making up our own best practices and working around issues. Some of these issues are already addressed in trunk, but I wanted to document what we went through today and what we can do about this. Any ways, if you are running a large CouchDB cluster in production, would love to hear from you.

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Mu Dynamics – Now A Cloud Company!

Here’s the news.. Mu has in many ways transformed itself into a Cloud company. This may seem surprising since the shift has happened at many levels and not always in a synchronized or premeditated manner. But the shift has already happened and it is both profound and exciting at the same time. Here’s why…

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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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