How to Expand Your Global Reach Into China

Special Considerations for Your Internet Presence in China

Andrew Sullivan / Director of Architecture, Dyn

Steven Ryder / Director of Platform Operations, C3Edge

October 22, 2014

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WHY LOCATE IN CHINA?

IT’S A BIG MARKET!

•  Enormous population

•  Increasing prosperity

§  Lots of consumers

§  Appetite for luxury goods

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SO WHAT?

THERE ARE UNUSUAL TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS

•  Serving from elsewhere not a great strategy

§  Appearance of outages

•  Latency and foreign experiences are both killers

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SOME CHALLENGES TO DISCUSS

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GLOBAL + CHINA

WHAT WORKS PERFECTLY OUTSIDE CHINA, MAY NOT WORK AT ALL ON THE MAINLAND

•  fonts.googleapis.com

•  NYTimes.com

•  embedded YouTube videos

•  many more

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CONGESTION

INTERNATIONAL INTERNET GATEWAYS TO US & EUROPE ARE OVERLOADED

•  long routes

•  frequent packet loss

•  low transfer rates

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DNS FAILURES

UNREACHABLE FOREIGN NAME SERVERS (DNS) & LOW TTLS ARE MAJOR SOURCES OF OUTAGES

•  Keeping traffic local is critical

•  DNS is fundamental to everything

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GREAT FIREWALL

THIS IS NOT LIKE THE FIREWALL IN YOUR OFFICE

•  Not “inside” and “outside”

•  No “DMZ”

•  DNS and IPs can be blocked in China (including entire TLDs)

§  Once blocked, there is no public address to ask why!

§  Partners with Government Affairs Departments provide value here

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UNEXPECTED OUTCOMES

BANNED CONTENT IN ONE PAGE CAN AFFECT YOUR ENTIRE SITE

•  User-generated content could be the trigger

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THINGS WE’VE HEARD CUSTOMERS SAY

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AFTER I’VE TRANSLATED, I’M GOOD TO GO!

APPEALING TO THE CHINESE MARKET IS NOT JUST ABOUT CHINESE LANGUAGE AND CHARACTERS

•  Site layouts and preferences vary

•  Long pages are common

•  Payment methods are different

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I CAN USE THE DNS I HAVE

IF YOUR DNS PROVIDER HAS NO PRESENCE IN CHINA, YOU MIGHT NOT EITHER

•  If the DNS lookup fails, nobody can find you

•  DNS lookup from inside China to outside fails frequently

•  The name cn.example.com probably just uses the same example.com name servers

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I’M IN HONG KONG. I’LL JUST USE THAT

HONG KONG IS A SPECIAL PLACE

•  HK data centers peer with carriers all over the world

§  Multi-carrier connectivity not standard

§  In-China experience dependent on user’s ISP

•  The Great Firewall does not include HK

•  Bandwidth from HK to China is expensive §  $80+/Mbps not uncommon!

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I DON’T NEED AN ICP LICENSE

EVEN IF YOU ARE DOING MARKETING OF OFF-LINE PRODUCTS, AN INTERNET CONTENT PROVIDER (ICP) LICENSE IS REQUIRED

•  Formal requirement for every site since July 2014

•  No exceptions

•  If you don’t get one, hosting and CDN companies will not be able to deliver your content in country

•  Issued by Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT)

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IT’S NOT JUST THE GREAT FIREWALL

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THE GREAT FIREWALL IS IMPORTANT

LOCAL POLICIES AFFECT WHAT YOU CAN DO, JUST LIKE EVERYWHERE ELSE ON THE INTERNET

•  URLs containing banned keywords will get TCP Reset

§  Breaks the site

•  Pages with banned content may be blocked

§  Included content can time out (e.g. missing CSS file breaks page layout)

§  Embedded objects (e.g. YouTube videos) can fail

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TUNNELS WON’T HELP YOU

BACKHAUL TRAFFIC TO FOREIGN LOCATIONS ARE STILL SUBJECT TO THE GREAT FIREWALL

•  IPSec, GRE tunnels, or VPNs to foreign origins are illegal in Mainland China

•  Traffic may be blocked & ICP license revoked

•  Using dedicated China names can help

§  Suggestion is to use .cn top-level domain

§  Avoid dependence on foreign (NS) Name Servers

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NETWORK TOPOLOGY IS CHALLENGING

CHINA IS NEXT TO THE “RING OF FIRE”

•  Fiber routinely breaks

•  Connections to Singapore and Japan are severed

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THE GREAT FIREWALL ISN’T THE GREAT PROBLEM

POLICY IS NOT THE ONLY OR MAIN SOURCE OF ISSUES.

•  Congestion and packet loss to overseas networks

•  Long routes and round trip times

•  Server and infrastructure failures

•  Browser compatibility and content problems

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CHINA IS A BIG PLACE

Mainland China is almost the same size as the US. Nobody thinks having one data center in the US is good enough for the whole country.

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YOUR COMPETITORS MIGHT HAVE AN ADVANTAGE

IF YOU’RE NOT IN CHINA AND YOUR COMPETITOR IS, YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS HAVE A WORSE EXPERIENCE WITH YOU

•  The interior network is fast, though often congested

•  If your traffic has to be served internationally, the latency is immediately visible §  And sometimes, everything is just broken

•  You can’t reach Chinese customers if they can’t reach you

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USE A REGIONAL STRATEGY

DIFFERENT PARTS OF YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE MIGHT NEED DIFFERENT TREATMENT

•  Host DNS and GSLB in Mainland China

§  Optimize your local service delivery

•  Consider hosting shared or global content nearby

§  Both HK and Taiwan avoid most cut fiber related outages

§  Network latency is greatly reduced

•  Separate .cn domain names provide flexibility

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PRACTICAL STEPS TO TAKE

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MEASURE & QUANTIFY

•  Measure your services from inside China §  On every major carrier:

•  Telecom (CT)

•  Unicom (CU/CNC)

•  Mobile (CMCC)

•  Review all channels and sub-domains

§  Look beyond your single “www” homepage

•  Identify hosting locations by checking IPs

§  Use dig and traceroute for reliable results

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CREATE A CHINA FOCUS TEAM

•  Form an internal focus team to specialize on performance and availability in China

•  Find partners to help

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SPECIFIC THINGS THE TEAM SHOULD EXAMINE

•  DNS Name Server (NS) availability

•  Page and service availability

•  Response Times (timeouts and slow-loading)

•  Browser Response Headers

§  All content, especially anything cacheable

All from within Mainland China, from multiple cities, and all major ISPs.

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OTHER THINGS THE TEAM SHOULD DO UP FRONT

•  Increase your DNS TTLs §  600 seconds as a default minimum

•  Extend HTTP Server keep-alive §  10-15 seconds time out value

§  Allow longer overall page load times

•  Define a China-specific architecture

§  Identify what’s foreign hosted today

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DON’T FORGET TO STUDY COMPETITORS

OTHERS HAVE ALREADY LEARNED FROM EXPERIENCE. DON’T NEGLECT THAT.

•  Study competitors’ deployments

§  See what’s working (or failing)

•  Consult with China deployment experts

§  Seek advice specific to your particular case

•  Separate your China and Global services §  Avoid collateral damage and unexpected outcomes

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INTERNET PERFORMANCE. DELIVERED.

THANK YOU!