Configtron: Tackling network diversity with heterogeneous configurations

The web serving protocol stack is constantly changing and evolving to tackle technological shifts in networking infrastructure and website complexity. For example, Cubic to tackle high throughput, SPDY to tackle loss and QUIC to tackle security issues and lower connection setup time. Accordingly, there are a plethora of protocols and configuration parameters that enable the web serving protocol stack to address a variety of realistic conditions. Yet, despite the diversity in end-user networks and devices, today, most content providers have adopted a “one-size-fits-all” approach to configuring user facing web stacks (CDN servers). In this paper, we illustrate the drawbacks through empirical evidence that this “one-size-fits-all” approach results in sub-optimal performance and argue for a novel framework that extends existing CDN architectures to provide programmatic control over the configuration options of the CDN serving stack.