How SURF reduced the indirect traffic of a CDN from 58% to 20%

About SURF

SURF is the national research and education network (NREN) of The Netherlands. As a collaborative organization, SURF works with members of Dutch education and research institutions to ensure and increase the quality, efficiency and security of their nationwide networks.

Challenges

SURF had held a direct interconnect with a well-renowned CDN since 2019. At the end of 2023 the IP Transit providers of SURF changed, and since then, SURF had been receiving 48% of the CDN traffic indirectly through one of the new transit providers. Without BENOCS Analytics, they didn’t have the visibility of the direct vs. indirect traffic, so this was an undiscovered challenge – or rather, a missed chance.

SURF traffic March-May 2024 — Before: SURF traffic from March to May 2024

Solution

BENOCS Analytics offers network operators full visualization off all traffic traversing the network, Having seen the capabilities it offers, the team at SURF decided to invest in the tool to functionally and financially optimize their network. Specifically the ability to see direct and indirect traffic was an integral part of the decision for the peering team: a Sankey diagram that displays the traffic flow, as well as a time series and statistical table that reveal traffic levels over time, would uncover various opportunities to optimize their peering strategy.

90%

increase in direct traffic

100%

traffic visibility

Implementation

After Flow Analytics was deployed, BENOCS’ data quality assurance team noticed the large amount of indirect traffic from a major CDN and informed Joachim, network engineer at SURF. Joachim was already in contact with the BGP Engineer of the CDN in question, and suggested corrections to the BGP announcements to steer traffic towards the direct interconnection and not via a transit provider.

Results and Benefits

After this change was implemented by the CDN end of May 2024, the direct traffic jumped from 42% to 80%, an absolute increase of 90%. Consequently, the indirect traffic fell, from 58% to 20%, bringing the traffic flow to the IP upstream provider below the Committed Data Rate (CDR). This shift in traffic to the direct interconnection with the CDN network saved substantial monthly costs for SURF.

After: SURF traffic from Jun 2024 to Jul 2024

“BENOCS Analytics is indispensable for SURF to be able to analyze and guard peering traffic that runs over many separate interconnections (both direct and via internet exchanges). This case study is a great example in which BENOCS Analytics helped us to analyze the suboptimal flow of traffic between a CDN network and SURF, in this case resulting in saved costs for IP transit. In general, the Border Planner module provides a regular usage health check on peering interconnections, as well as during events (e.g. during DDoS, traffic shifts), when it is a great solution for analyzing traffic flows; especially for traffic that originates from a network with which there is no direct peering.”

Niels den Otter

Teamlead Network Experts

SURF

Future Plans

In the coming months, SURF will cooperate with BENOCS to implement BGP-LS functionality within the product. For SURF this provides a secure and scalable way to update the network topology within BENOCS automatically, and be able to visualize backbone traffic.

Furthermore, SURF will work with BENOCS to look at traffic in multiple VRFs and analyze traffic flows in separate services that run on the network.

Conclusion

Implementing BENOCS Analytics was a lightbulb moment for SURF: upon seeing the amount of indirect traffic entering their network, the Dutch NREN was able to adjust their peering accordingly. This resulted in substantial financial savings and optimized traffic flow. BENOCS Analytics is now an essential tool in SURF’s peering management and strategy.

FCN 2024

This Friday, Sep 27, Ingmar Poese will give a talk at Future Computing and Networking Workshop in Hanover, Germany. Entitled “From Research to Business”, his talk will give the participants insight into the devlopment of BENOCS from its beginnings as a research project into the company it is today.

FCN24 is an academic event, jointly organized by Leibniz Universität Hannover, Delft University of Technology, University of Helsinki, Tsinghua University, Technical University of Munich, and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. https://lnkd.in/eMP38Uh7

Some of the topics this year’s workshop will cover are:
🌐 Edge Computing
🤖 Generative AI
📱 Future Mobile 6G
📡 IoT Systems and Communications
💻 Approximate Computing
📈 Data Analytics

European Peering Forum

We are really excited to be sponsoring European Peering Forum again this year! 🎉

Next week Stephan Schroeder, Aitor Mendaza-Ormaza, Péter György and Hari Jayaraman will be in Vienna to catch up with the European peering community. Come and visit us at our booth or get in touch beforehand if you’d like to set up a meeting with the team.

Asia Peering Forum

Next Wednesday, August 21 at 11:35am local time, Hari Jayaraman will present at Asia Peering Forum in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

His presentation, entitled “Forward path – matching routes to traffic levels”, will visualize indirect peering routes and assymmetrical traffic paths and the impact these have on networks.

SIGCOMM 2024

Exciting news! A research paper co-authored by BENOCS co-founder and CTO, Ingmar Poese, has been accepted at this year’s SIGCOMM, taking place from August 4-8 in Sydney, Australia.

The paper, entitled “IPD: Detecting Traffic Ingress Points at ISPs”, proposes an efficient approach that accurately identifies traffic ingress points in ISPs of any size using flow-level traffic traces.

Take a looks at the list of accepted papers here: https://lnkd.in/dBzbAXVb

We will post more details on the full program as they come in.

TNC 24

Next week we are excited to be sponsoring TNC 24 in Rennes and are looking forward to meeting up with the European NREN community once more.

Come visit booth no. 5 to meet Péter György, Hari Jayaraman and Ingmar Poese and discuss how your network is faring.

There might even be some BENOCS swag waiting for you. 😉

Oh, and if you haven’t registered yet for the event, you still can until tomorrow (June 6)!

RIPE 88

It’s (already) that time again – RIPE88 is happening next week in Krakow. Stephan, our CEO, and Hari (Manager Sales & Strategy) will be joined by our CTO and co-founder Ingmar, as well as Aitor, our product manager.

They are looking forward to catching up with everyone in the RIPE community. If you’d like a meeting set up with them for a chat about BENOCS Anayltics or even just a hot beverage, drop us a line and we’ll sort something out.

TMA 2024

Next week our senior network engineer, Danny A. Lachos Perez, is off to Dresden to the Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA 2024). There he will take part in an exciting program surrounding topics on network function virtualization, software-defined networks, content distribution networks, and a whole bunch more.

Get in touch with him or us if you’d like to meet up with him and find out more about any aspects BENOCS Analytics.

ANGA COM

It’s time for the broadband and media community to come together again for the 2024 edition of ANGA COM in Cologne. Stephan will be around on day 1 (May 14) and Shankar Mondal will on the ground Wednesday and Thursday.

For questions about traffic analytics in your network, reach out to them directly or send us a message and we’ll set up a meeting.

SANOG 41

In a few days, Hari will take off, bound for India and SANOG41, taking place from April 29-30 in Mumbai. We are excited to be sponsoring the event for the very first time and can’t wait to meet up with the South Asian network operations and communications services community.

Will we see you there?