Schedule: Networking, Traffic, and Edge Management sessions

Most people working with CDN caches know about the Vary header, but few properly understand what it really does. With the advent of the Key header, new patterns for varying cache content will soon emerge. Andrew Betts shares common and advanced use cases for Vary, such as language, A/B testing, compression, and service worker support, and outlines potential changes to consider when Key arrives. Read more.

Serving a billion requests per day with a dynamic video packager makes unique demands on a load balancer. Andrew Rodland shares a new consistent hashing algorithm developed by Google researchers that helped improve cache locality and optimize delivery—and made a contribution to open source software in the process. Read more.

During flash sales, when milliseconds matter, bots buy faster than humans. These bots created a constant load on Shopify’s infrastructure and SREs—until the company decided to create an automated system to detect and block nearly all bot traffic on its load balancers. Felix Glaser offers an overview of this system and shares the challenges Shopify faced differentiating between bots and humans. Read more.

Kristopher Beevers discusses the evolution of the edge delivery architecture of major DNS service provider NS1, from its earliest prototypes to the large, heavily automated global network it operates today, and the many operational lessons learned along the way. Read more.

Susie Xia and Anant Rao explain how LinkedIn leverages live production traffic to determine service and resource bottlenecks at scale with a tool called Redliner and how you can use your current architecture to do the same. Read more.