A new visual dashboard launched by Cedexis on Monday provides a country-by-country, vendor-by-vendor view of CDN and cloud performance. A tool like this is important as companies evaluate moving more workloads to the cloud or clouds because it gives them some basis for comparison.
Update: Here’s a taste of Cedexis’s dashboard showing cloud provider performance:
Cedexis was founded in 2009 by two Akamai veterans to help businesses choose the best clouds and CDNs for their needs on a dynamic basis. If there’s an outage or slowdown on one cloud, the Cedexis service can move that workload elsewhere. One customer saw 40 percent page-load improvement just by using Cedexis for network optimization — and this was a sophisticated customer that was already using advanced cloud and CDN technologies, said Cedexis co-founder Julien Coulon.
For the report, Cedexis collects data from a few hundred customers that embed a piece of JavaScript code on their websites. Cedexis aggregates data ”about the performance, errors, throughputs from every network in the world, putting it out in a way to help them choose which [cloud or CDN] they should work with,” Coulon said via phone from the company’s Paris office. “This is real data from real end users who need to see what’s happening. And we’re doing this transparently in a way that helps the cloud and CDN providers improve their quality of service.”
“No provider is good everywhere, all the time, for all users, but if you mix them right you can get significant improvement in your web site performance,” Coulon said.
Cedexis sells its service to large content providers, including French media companies Canal+ and FranceTelevisions and luxury consumer products makers Dior and Piaget. U.S.-based customers include Mozilla. On the monitoring side, Cedexis competes with Compuware’s Gomez and Keynote Systems. On the network load-balancing side, it vies with companies like F5 Networks.
Amazon is the cloud giant that most companies evaluate when they want to make a move, but the company doesn’t provide a ton of insight into its inner workings. While some might think that Amazon and Akamai, the CDN leader, might take umbrage to statistics that might show them in a less-than-stellar light, tools like this could also help them to improve their services. Amazon, which suffered a serious outage last year which Cedexis profiled here, might also welcome the opportunity to show more about its performance, going forward, as more competition from the OpenStack players comes online.
Update: And with that, here’s another taste of the Cedexis data, this time on CDNs:
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