Amazon.com just introduced the Kindle Fire. More interesting than the device itself is the statement Amazon is making by launching its Amazon Silk browser, which leverages Amazon’s cloud computing horsepower to push much of the browser’s work into the cloud. This innovative approach to the browser paradigm is a significant step toward a future in which the Web is “Cloud Accelerated”. Here at Yottaa, we share this vision of this “Cloud accelerated” future, and have been working hard to make it a reality.

At Yottaa, we want to make the web faster and better, for every website, every user, and every client. When Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) emerged more than ten years ago, they helped tremendously in making the web faster and more accessible. However, we believe the Web has changed, and as it has evolved, its needs have outgrown mere CDNs. A better and faster web is going to be cloud-accelerated.

The Web Has Evolved Beyond the Content Delivery Network (CDN)

 

1. Today’s web pages are complex creations that require sophisticated browser processing. As Jeff Bezos noted when introducing Amazon Silk, most modern Web pages, such as those found on Amazon.com or CNN.com, are complex creations, with multiple photos, dynamic behaviors, animations or multimedia, complex scripts, and markup code. The CNN home page, for instance, is composed of 53 static images, 39 dynamic images, three Flash files, 30 JavaScript files, 29 HTML files, and seven CSS files. For the home page alone, that’s over 160 resources that the browser needs to load, parse, execute, and/or render, from 18 domains resolving to any number of hundreds of servers located in many different geographic locations. A few other examples are shown below:

AmericanAirlines.com

MLB.com

NewEgg.com

2. Today’s Web clients have evolved and multiplied too – many different browsers on many different devices. Ten years ago, Internet Explorer on desktop PC was essentially the only web client that mattered. Today, different versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari all have meaningful market shares. And the Mobile Web has finally arrived: iPhone, iPad, and Android devices such as Amazon Kindle Fire are finally reaching mainstream adoption as web clients.

3. Over 85% of web performance now resides on the front end.

 

Site	Page Load Time (seconds)	Back End Processing (seconds)	Front End  processing (seconds)	Front End Percentage
www.jetblue.com	7.38	0.548	6.832	92.6%
www.mlb.com	8.58	0.701	7.879	91.2%
www.cnn.com	4.96	0.372	4.588	92.5%
www.nytimes.com	5.16	0.456	4.704	91.1%

The image below shows how the JetBlue.com homepage is loaded by a real browser. [Data collected by Yottaa Website Monitor and averaged over one month.] On average, it took 7.38 seconds for the JetBlue homepage to be rendered and become interactive. The browser only spent about 548 milliseconds to retrieve the HTML page from the server, before spending 6.83 seconds in processing and rendering the page – so 92.6% is on the front end in this specific example:

The Web, Cloud Accelerated

The Web has evolved. Today’s more diverse, more interactive Web requires more than a Content Delivery Network (CDN). The future of fast web user experience is “Cloud Accelerated”.

The goal of Yottaa Site Speed Optimizer is to deliver a faster user experience for any website on any platform to any user using any web client anywhere. We are leveraging the vast amount of bandwidth and processing capacity available in the cloud to make the Web better and faster. We run a vast array of optimizations in the cloud, in real-time, to speed up the web experience for every user. Below is an illustration of how it works. we encourage you to try it for free: