We had a client recently who had problems with attacks from what could only be described as “State Actors”. Leaving politics aside for a moment, they were publishing information, hosted on AWS in the USA, which was not sitting well with a major government.

The problem was that their WordPress sites were being smashed by automated traffic, and while they didn’t crash (because of a resilient architecture), it was very difficult for legitimate traffic to get through.

We use New Relic to monitor the site’s vitals and it wasn’t hard to see what was going on. They bad guys were just flooding the web server with technically valid requests and keeping it too busy. Ultimately, the workload would trigger an auto-scaling increase, which just got flooded as well.

Our solution was actually very simple. We put Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the web servers, which also added local distribution points, and then attached AWS Shield Advanced to stop the majority of attacks before they even got to the customer’s services.

Almost immediately we noted that the web services started to scale back in, because the amount of work they had to do dropped dramatically.

Now, there are plenty of folks who will object that Shield is a pretty expensive solution (compared to say, AWS WAF), but the cost of compute resources dropped sufficiently that the customer actually saved money!

Sorry Elon, but you are not always right… Whether it’s NBN SkyMuster, StarLink or Amazon Kupier, Satellite-based broadband has one major problem that technology cannot yet solve: The speed of light.

The problem is that space is actually a long way up when your sitting here on planet Earth, and radio signals can’t travel faster than the speed of light (technically, they can’t travel as fast as light, but let’s ignore that for a moment), and it takes a little under half a second to make a round-trip from your house to the satellite, back to earth and then to the destination.

For watching movies, this is not really a problem at all, and if that’s what you mostly use broadband for, then Satellite can be a great option, especially if you’re in an area not well served by terrestrial broadband technology. But if you need an interactive service such as video conferencing, or remote desktop computing you are likely to find this delay pretty frustrating.

In many areas, there are options such as the ever-expanding 5G mobile broadband services. Talk to us, and let’s find a solution which works best for you.

SmarterTanks is our newest service offering. It brings monitoring and automation to domestic water reclamation (septic tanks). Residents now have the peace of mind from continuous automated monitoring and alerting and service providers have an instant view of the condition of their client’s installation.

Previously, checking the condition of a tank means a visit from the service provider, now the data is collected every minute and available as a dashboard type view. Equipment malfunction can be detected earlier and service calls scheduled, perhaps even before the customer is aware of a problem.

The best part is that no changes are required to the existing installation, beyond fitting a sensor station to the top of the tank. Connection is either via the domestic WiFi, or a dedicated mobile-data connection.

SmarterTanks will be available from December 2022.