Tackling Latency and Web Site Performance With Kindle Fire and Acceleration as a Service

I continue to wonder at the beauty of the iPad®. It’s slick and powerful and comes with a price tag to match. Newly announced Amazon’s Kindle Fire is not as powerful or slick, but can access content just as well as the iPad can for just $199! The most amazing part about the Kindle, at least to me as a product manager, is its new Silk browser, which is partially to thank for the lower hardware cost needed to run apps, stream content and shop the web. One of the neat things about Silk is its “split browser architecture,” which dynamically determines whether to use the onboard Kindle hardware to process transactions such as accessing a web site, or push them to the cloud where far off computers collectively do the same thing. The end result is that web sites load faster with the combined power of the Kindle and the remotely located computing and storage systems.

Increasing the speed of every CIO, whose charge is to run a corporate website or web-based application, has on his or her mind. Amazon is painfully aware of the impact of latency since their testing revealed that every 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1% and this is a big concern since Kindle is a gateway to Amazon.com.

Analogous to the way Amazon tackled these concerns on the tablet, the company I work for, Internap, has tackled the same concerns at the network level. Our TCP Acceleration as a Service (AaaS) not only allows users to load web applications up to 400% faster than without it, but also maintains consistent, accelerated performance throughout their entire session.

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