How to improve network resilience with NS1 Connect Filter Chains

Community service outages occur. It’s not a matter of if however when. Cloud platforms and content material supply networks (CDNs) with 100% uptime SLAs aren’t immune. They expertise outages similar to all the things else.

The query is: what do you do when one among your community providers goes down? Will the shortage of redundant providers knock you offline? Or will you failover to a different supplier, sustaining a seamless person expertise? On the back-end, how will that failover course of work? Will it’s automated or guide?

Most midsize and enormous organizations have redundant systems in place to assist them survive an outage. What they may or may not have in place is the automated mechanism that redirects visitors to these redundant methods when a core service goes down.

IBM NS1 Join Filter Chain™ know-how makes use of the facility of DNS to mechanically reroute visitors between service suppliers when there’s a community service disruption. With just a few primary guidelines in place, NS1 Join monitors your network’s status and switches endpoints as wanted. You set the foundations and the priorities upfront; all the things after that occurs mechanically.

On the NS1 platform, filter chain configurations are utilized to particular person information inside DNS zones. Filter chains decide how NS1 handles queries towards every file—particularly, which solutions to return. Every filter chain makes use of a novel logic to course of queries. You possibly can create combos of filters to realize a selected final result primarily based in your operational or enterprise wants.

After all, not everybody desires to direct failover visitors in the identical approach. So, we’ve put collectively a fast information on find out how to construct active-active, active-passive and guide failover methods by utilizing filter chains.

Energetic-active failover

On this use case, NS1 or third-party information sources monitor the standing of particular person endpoints in your utility supply infrastructure. When the information signifies an outage on one system, NS1 mechanically routes visitors to the secondary methods you select. It’s known as “active-active” as a result of these secondary methods are in all probability up and operating as a part of your load balancing system anyway. When there’s an outage in a single system, NS1 simply rebalances the load towards the already lively methods.

The primary filter within the chain is “Up”. This filter tells the system whether or not the service supplier’s endpoint is operational or not.

The second filter within the chain is both “Shuffle” or “Weighted Shuffle”. If the “Up” filter returns a “false” reply for any endpoint, it mechanically distributes visitors to different suppliers. Shuffle distributes visitors randomly, whereas Weighted Shuffle distributes it primarily based on weights you present.

Lastly, specify what number of solutions you need DNS to offer to inbound queries. RFC 1912 requires that just one reply ought to be returned for each CNAME question. The “Choose First N” filter means that you can specify the variety of solutions which can be returned to the requesting consumer, however the default have to be one.

Energetic-passive failover

As within the active-active use case, NS1 or third-party information sources monitor the standing of your utility supply infrastructure and route visitors to secondary methods within the occasion of a major system outage. The distinction right here is that the secondary methods will not be dealing with visitors already—they’re solely spun up when wanted as a redundant possibility.

As within the earlier instance, the primary filter on this chain is “Up”. Drawing from monitoring information, NS1 figures out which of the underlying providers are on-line.

The second filter on this chain is “Precedence”. This filter creates a logic that prioritizes lively methods over passive or backup methods. If the upper precedence solutions can be found, they are going to kind to the primary place on the attainable reply record. If not, NS1 continues down the precedence record till it finds an out there useful resource.

Lastly, “Choose First N” dictates the variety of solutions to ship. The reply you’d need it to ship on this case is one.

Handbook failover

Typically you wish to make failover choices solely after extra concerning the state of affairs. In these circumstances, the filter chain is the implementation mechanism that you just use when you’ve decided the place you need visitors to go. As a substitute of pointing a knowledge feed to NS1, you’ll manually flip the filter on when it’s wanted by utilizing the active-passive logic.

The primary filter on this chain is “Up”, with the distinction right here that you just manually outline which providers are up and down (as a substitute of a knowledge feed doing that for you).

The second filter on this chain is “Precedence”, beginning with lively methods over passive or backup methods. If the upper precedence solutions can be found, they kind to the primary place on the attainable reply record. If not, NS1 continues down the precedence record till it finds an out there useful resource.

Lastly, “Choose First N” dictates the variety of solutions to ship. The reply you’d need it to ship on this case is one.

Multi-cloud or multi-CDN availability

Within the “active-active” situation above, the filter chain makes use of a easy up/down metric to steer visitors. Nonetheless, generally service availability is extra nuanced. For instance, providers generally expertise regional outages that lead to poor service high quality—whereas the service as a complete is technically “up”, it will not be acting at optimum capability. This filter chain allows you to add some nuance to what’s thought of “up”, utilizing NS1 Join’s superior analytics software as the information supply.

The primary filter on this chain is “Pulsar Availability Threshold”. This filter means that you can set a proportion worth that can decide the utilization of a service primarily based on availability metrics.

The second filter within the chain is “Weighted Shuffle”, which distributes visitors to different suppliers that meet the definition of “out there” from the primary filter. Site visitors is distributed primarily based on weights that you just present.

The third filter is “Pulsar Efficiency Type”, which takes the weighted distribution from the earlier filter and directs visitors to the quickest out there service, eliminating low-performing providers primarily based on a threshold you outline.

Lastly, “Choose First N” will dictate the variety of solutions to ship. The reply you’d need it to ship on this case is one.

For extra info on find out how to use filter chains to enhance efficiency and resilience, lower prices and extra, discover extra under.

Guard against outages with resilient, redundant network services