fak3r

NOTE: at work I installed a web proxy to separate internal user traffic from external traffic hitting our production servers.  While I’m not part of the network team, they asked me to do this because of my prior experience and interest in such things.  The idea of this was to be a temporary fix until they get a new line installed providing greater bandwidth, but my argument is for the continuation of this segmentation even after the new line is installed.  Below is a slightly sanitized version of my arguments for this. Note that my thoughts and comments are driven by years of running networks, thus it is something I care about and have spent years thinking about, so it is wordy.  I’d be very happy to discuss this, or other solutions, via the comments below because I never want to stop learning.

I’d like to share my thoughts in as to why I think the network is better served with keeping internal traffic and public traffic separate.  Regardless of if you use the existing web proxy server, or another one with different network topology, I care less about the tool, and more about making the network and user experience better for both internal and external users (more…)

Does anyone have any CDN experience they’d like to share?  At my gig we need to move about 80-100GB of files to another provider, because we’re serving up ~8.5GB/day, and it’s killing our internal bandwidth. (yes, we’re going to segment this soon) We’ve considered things as basic as GoDaddy, but at 6.99$/month that has to just be file hosting, not a CDN right?  A package for that amount of data at Cachefly looks like it’d be around 99$/month.  Other things like Amazon’s S3 are being priced out, but what about Akami, Level3, etc.  Any advice, guidance appreciated, we’ll likely go with the easiest way for now, but come next year we’ll need a real strategy for a global content system, be it a CDN or a distributed filesystem spread across clusters. (aw yeah, that’s the stuff…)