The term Application Optimization encompasses a wide range of techniques. You’ll find that a web search for Application Optimization reveals as many answers as there are companies providing this as a product or service. And what about Application Acceleration? Well, that’ll provide a whole new range of things to think about!
From Replify’s perspective, we define Application Optimization as the combination of techniques that make an application perform better for its users. While an improved user experience can be tricky to quantify, it’s what matters for most businesses. When referring to the Replify Accelerator, we typically use the term WAN Optimization. This is because we focus on mitigating the effects of a slow WAN on application performance. Therefore, WAN Optimization plays a key role in Application Optimization to get the best user experience from an organisation’s applications.
Often, an application is designed with a particular network in mind, typically one that works best for application. Developers are focused on features and usability on this ‘ideal’ network. When users attempt to use the application remotely, or over a lower quality link, they’ll have a degraded user experience. Quick and easy solutions are often employed that can make a difference. For example, turning on compression on a webserver. This can be worthwhile but doesn’t make much of a difference if you’re just copying images or files that have already been compressed.
The level of optimization applied to many applications by their authors can be quite basic. It’s not often the case that a developer simulates a satellite connection to see how well their app works. When they do, the conclusion may just be “It’s slow, but it’s still usable, I guess”.
How does WAN Optimization make a difference?
Instead of the developers having to re-design an application, an Application Acceleration solution that uses WAN optimization can help. For example, your application may be client-server based and use HTTP (or HTTP/2) for communication. Because Replify Accelerator can optimize HTTP traffic without changing it’s content, we can accelerate the application without having to make any changes to it.
Maybe the application is slow to start up because lots of TCP connection handshakes need to take place over a high latency connection. Not a problem! Replify Accelerator’s connection pooling feature will speed things up with little effort.
Application Optimization can be about more than performance though. It can also include improving security. Replify Accelerator can encrypt the traffic using TLS 1.3 at the same time as optimizing it.
Replify Accelerator as Part of an Application Optimization Suite
There are other techniques that can be considered Application Optimization that Replify Accelerator doesn’t apply. That’s where our products portability and flexibility comes in. The Replify Accelerator can be quickly and seamlessly deployed alongside other products and hardware.
For example, you want to use QoS to prioritize a critical application. The Replify Accelerator will pass along your QoS markers. If TLS Offloading is required, that’s no problem, Replify Accelerator will work with your load balancer.
Replify prides itself on its flexibility. Interoperability with other applications is one example of this. We’re always keen to learn more about complementary technologies and do what we can to be able to co-exist. Our belief is that it is better to have a solution made up of several complementary specialist technologies rather than having a single solution that does everything but excels at nothing.
If you want to know more about how Replify Accelerator can help optimize your applications and transform your user’s experience, please contact us at sales@replify.com.