Outsmarting traffic on the internet

Imagine you live in a city known for congested highways like Los Angeles, California. Accidents happen all the time on major arteries such as the 405 Freeway, causing a backup along your commute route. The same problems happen on the information superhighway.

On the roadways, people used to have to guess whether it was better to try another route or not. Now with data being gathered by users of mobile applications like Waze, computers can apply algorithms and automatically re-route you and save time getting you to your destination.

Can we do outsmart traffic on the internet? The internet can get awfully crowded at times. Network links can get saturated, and packets can get dropped. But is it a temporary glitch from a router misconfiguration? Or is it a periodic event happening every evening? Which network providers are causing my application problems? 

Just like when you start your morning commute, you can monitor network traffic reports. A typical approach would be to re-route enterprise application traffic. Maybe you can adjust your route for the morning for at least part of the way-if you're a network engineer for your company WAN. Once traffic traverses the public internet, there are issues such as peering (dis)agreements, congestion at different network junctions, router misconfiguration, and other issues that can impact end user experience. 

We rely and depend on the internet to deliver unique digital experiences, but we often forget how volatile it can be. Outsmarting a volatile internet is hard to do. How can businesses monitor, understand and address the threats the internet poses? Are there tools and methods for managing the data path over the public internet?

Kyle York, vice president, product strategy, and general manager for Oracle + Dyn and I want to explore this topic and provide some solutions for the audience as SXSW 2019. Please vote for our presentation proposal on the SXSW PanelPicker site. Hope to see you in Austin!