It’s no secret that a lot happens behind the scenes. In everything from a film production to the water flowing from your tap, a lot goes into making things work as anticipated, and there’s no greater illustration of that than the internet. Whether it’s the software you’re using to access it, the hardware infrastructure it’s built upon or the software on the hardware, they all need to play nicely together to deliver a consistent online user experience. It’s in this space that urllo lives. When it comes to the streets of the internet, you’ll find us underground orchestrating seamless traffic redirection for our customers, and more importantly for their customers, regardless of where they are in the world.
Over the past 6 months we’ve been working behind the scenes to ensure things run smoothly for our customers. We are thrilled to announce the general availability of our all-new redirector edge network as well as some further enhancements to our redirector engine API. Both will allow us to deliver a scalable, consistent experience for our customers and their users.
Version two of the urllo redirector edge network consists of various devices that sit at the “edge” (i.e. the outermost layer) of our URL redirector infrastructure. Our new version has 96 points of presence (POP) around the world and uses a technology called Anycast. With Anycast, requests are automatically routed to the closest POP, which then routes the request inside of our private network to our closest data center to finish processing the request. This type of processing ensures an incredibly fast user experience for your visitors by dramatically lowering any potential latency they could experience worldwide. Getting them where they need to go, faster. Anycast also enables us to add or move the data centers we use to process requests without requiring our users to modify their DNS settings. V2 of the urllo Redirector Edge Network provides us additional tools to combat DDoS attacks, which further improves reliability going forward. In the future, as additional POPs will be added, your visitors will experience continual performance improvement globally. It’s only up from here!
Customers can easily take advantage of the improved edge network, without any downtime, by making a simple one-time change to the DNS settings for each hostname they want to use it on. Your urllo dashboard will now highlight any opportunities to improve your DNS configuration, including using our new V2 edge network. We will continue to support V1 of our redirector edge network going forward - including maintaining its current set of IP addresses and CNAMEs. Having said that, we consider V1 to be deprecated and future improvements to urllo may only be deployed to our V2 infrastructure.
With regards to our API enhancements, we’d received some great user feedback to improve the integration experience with urllo Our latest updates are all about programmatically managing your hosts and redirect rules, they include:
- Exposing all of the new host settings from our recent release, allowing you to fetch and modify those settings on a per-host basis via the API.
- The ability to search redirect rules by source or target URL with query parameters to quickly find the records you need.
- The option to create or update a redirect rule using our public API, you can also access the required DNS settings for the resulting hosts. This will allow you to programmatically report or update DNS settings within your own systems.
- We’ve updated our API documentation to include these changes, you can find them here.
This announcement marks the end of some long-in-development changes to our URL redirector engine, but they are hardly the only enhancements we’ve got planned. Stay tuned for more exciting updates next month!
