Extending the Application Developer’s Sphere of Influence

In traditional cloud deployments, the ability of developers to dictate and influence the overall experience and delivery of applications is really quite limited. Want to make your application faster or more secure? There’s only so much you can do. But that sphere of influence is growing – rapidly – and developers would be wise to consider the larger view of what that means for user experience, and how they build their apps.

In a traditional hyperscaler deployment (AWS, Azure or GCP, for instance), the cloud instance exists within a datacenter protected behind a firewall. At the far end of the connection sits the application user. Between that user and the application is a many-hop pathway comprised of the user’s ISP, the intermediate provider, the internet backbone, the hyperscaler ISP and then, finally, the application instance inside the datacenter. Everything except that last bit is outside of the control of the application developer. Have security or performance concerns about that user experience outside the datacenter? Too bad.

This is one of the fundamental reasons that Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) were created almost 30 years ago. What a CDN does is move some of the application (typically, content) out of the datacenter and place it closer to the user. This allows the developer to influence the user experience, in this instance making delivery of content – say, the images on a website – more efficient and responsive. Or it might entail adding a security layer to prevent bad actors from stealing user data or penetrating your application from the outside.

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