Edge Security Acceleration:What is ESA?

• Acceleration

  Based on the impressive global network with over 3,200 points of presence (POPs) and content distribution capabilities of Alibaba Cloud CDN, ESA further integrates edge computing and security features to deliver and secure acceleration for dynamic and static content.

• Edge computing

  You can write code and deploy it on POPs to process requests closer to your users. This significantly reduces processing latency and protects your origin server from being overwhelmed by an excessive number of concurrent requests. As a result, bandwidth costs are cut down and smooth user experience is ensured.

• Security

  ESA provides edge security services on POPs. You can enable DDoS mitigation and Web Application Firewall (WAF) to identify and block attacks on POPs. This keeps risks away from data centers and safeguards your assets such as websites, APIs, and applications deployed at the edge. In addition, ESA provides features such as SSL certificates and access control to protect your data in a more efficient, secure manner.

Architecture

The following figure shows how ESA works.

Adaptive content acceleration

Once your domain is a part of the ESA community, ESA classifies the content requested by your users as static or dynamic content. Then, it automatically selects an acceleration policy based on the type of content to speed up the delivery.

• If users request static content, the requests are most likely served directly from the POP nearest to the users. If the requested content is not cached on the POP or has expired, the request is redirected to the origin server. After retrieving the content from the origin server, ESA caches the content on its POPs and serves the content to users.

• If users request dynamic content, the Smart Routing feature of ESA automatically picks the most efficient route to the origin server to retrieve the requested content and then delivers it to users. At the same time, persistent connections are maintained between POPs and the origin server and between individual POPs. This further reduces the time required to retrieve dynamic content.

Intelligent, elastic edge computing services

You can deploy services or lightweight applications (referred to as routines) on POPs to implement edge processing, minimizing response latency. Client requests are automatically routed to the nearest POPs, triggering routines on receipt to handle the requests.

Edge security

ESA POPs provide features such as WAF protection and DDoS mitigation, which serve to filter out malicious requests and redirect only trusted requests to the origin server. These features protect web servers against intrusions, secure business-critical data, and prevent performance degradation caused by attacks.

Scenarios

Gaming

ESA is an ideal choice for web-based games and multiplayer online battle arenas. Aside from providing acceleration services such as route optimization and cache-based acceleration, ESA can also provide security services.

E-commerce

E-commerce webpages contain a large number of images and text elements which can be accelerated by ESA. Furthermore, ESA's edge computing capabilities let you use the computing resources on POPs to render pages. This provides two major benefits: you no longer have to render the pages on your origin, and your users no longer have to render pages on their clients. The pages are rendered on and served from the POPs, speeding up responses and page loading.

ESA lets you deploy such services on POPs, shortening the distance between you and your users and reducing response times by over 50%.

Finance

The financial industry has strict requirements on the availability and security of their networks. For example, transactions are dynamic and interactive processes, and are vulnerable to attacks if they are performed over unsecured cross-network connections. Therefore, we recommend that you use the WAF and DDoS mitigation features provided by ESA in financial scenarios to safeguard every transaction.