Failover early: When to failover at your CDN

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Your risk mitigation strategy must layer the most cost-efficient strategies to effectively mitigate or reduce the adverse effects of failure. Manuel Alvarez explores using the CDN as a failover tool, reviewing use cases and demonstrating how to decide whether to use a CDN by evaluating costs, benefits, operations, and time to mitigate.

Unless you are a CPA, you probably hate filing your taxes and use tools or hire a professional to help you mitigate the pain. (You also probably avoid the topic until the deadline is around the corner.) But no matter what you do, taxes always happen. Just like taxes, nobody likes to talk about data center errors, requests timing out, slow databases, or web servers casually dropping a 5xx response every blue moon, as many people see it as an admission of failure. This cannot be farther from the truth—these things happen. You need a risk mitigation strategy that layers the most cost efficient strategies to reduce or eliminate adverse effects when things do not work as expected. CDNs are an extension of your infrastructure. They give you control over the transport network (the internet) and provide the cloud features that can be executed close to your clients and offload your infrastructure (whether cloud or on-premises), where it is normally more expensive to serve and process this content. One of the features common to many CDNs is failover. Failover at this layer means serving an alternate response when a condition is met. Manuel Alvarez explores using the CDN as a failover tool, reviewing use cases and best practices and demonstrating how to decide whether to use a CDN by evaluating costs, benefits, operations, and time to mitigate. When it’s a good idea to use a CDN for failover: When it’s a bad idea to use your CDN for failover: