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Working with Services

IO River service represents a portion of your traffic, it is logically equivalent to a Website in Cloudflare, a Property in Akamai, a Service in Fastly, a Distribution in CloudFront, etc. Service can include multiple domains, and multiple origins. You can also define custom behaviors for your traffic. You can utilize different types of CDNs in a single service. Each service has a unique CNAME which should be used in order to direct traffic to the service.

Prerequisites​

Before starting to work with services, you will need to have the following:

  • IO River Account - sign up for a free account.
  • CDN Account - You will need at least one CDN account to be used with your service.
  • Origin - You should have at least one Origin server. Origin is where your content is being stored, for example a S3 bucket or other HTTP server.
  • Domain - Domain name which will be used by end-users to access your content, for example, www.example.com.

If you do not want to manage your own domain, or do not own a domain altogether, you can use a domain provided by IO River:

  • A domain, e.g. 31d29d9827df4c.ioriver.net, is created automatically.
  • A IO River managed certificate is created, signed, and attached to the service.
  • The DNS record for the domain is created automatically.
  • Once the service is deployed on your CDN providers, you can run traffic immediately.

Managing Services​

On the Services page, you can browse your services in either a table view or a cards view.

  • Table view is useful when you have many services.
  • Cards view is useful when you prefer a more visual layout.

Both views support filtering, so you can quickly narrow the list and locate the exact services you need.

In table view, you can further customize how data is presented: select which columns are shown and their order, and sort the services.

To inspect a service from either view, click the service row (in table view) or the service card (in cards view). This opens a side panel with more details.

To fully manage a service, click the service name. This drills down into the service management page, where you can configure and maintain that service.

Configuring Services​

You can configure many aspects of your service configuration:

  • Domains, origins, and mappings between them.
  • Behaviors, such as edge caching, browser caching, header manipulations, URL signing, etc.
  • Traffic log streaming, AKA log shipping, to an S3 bucket or Hydrolyx table for further analysis.
  • Security engines, such as WAF and bot management.

Changes in the above configuration are collected in the IO River platform, and are then deployed in the service CDN providers:

  • Depending on the CDN provider, deployment can take a while ranging from several minutes to almost an hour.
  • Therefore, we recommend performing multiple changes and deploying them once they are ready.
  • Changes are collected in a Draft Configuration, and can be deployed by clicking Deploy.
  • You can also compare the draft configuration with the currently active configuration.

Additionally, there are aspects of your service that pertain to IO River traffic monitoring and steering:

  • Traffic policies
  • Sensors, AKA monitors

These configurations are not deployed to the service CDN providers, and are implemented as soon as you modify them.

Deploying Services Configuration Changes​

When you create a service, or change its configuration, IO River needs to deploy the changes on all the relevant CDN providers. This is also true when you add a new CDN provider to an existing service.

IO River implements the configuration change in the background, as an Async Task:

  • Async tasks appear in the Lab flask icon at the top-bar of the console.
  • The recent 4 tasks appear and you can see their status: running, finished successfully, or failed.
  • IO River translates the service configuration into the specific changes required per CDN provider, and sends the change, which can take a while.
    • For some providers this can take minutes, for others it can take up to one hour.
  • While this deployment is taking place, no other configuration changes in the service can be made.
    • Obviously, other services can be modified in parallel.

Even after all the changes have been deployed, CDN providers take a while to propagate the new configuration across the network:

  • For some providers this can take a significant additional time.
  • While this is taking place, the Edge Sync icon at the top-bar indicates that the new configuration is still being propagated, and edge platforms are syncing.
  • At this point, clients accessing the service domains might receive the new configuration or the previous one, depending on the PoP they access.
  • When the icon is still, the change is fully deployed and all clients will receive the new configuration.