Village Gamer

Web acceleration provider Strangeloop Networks has announced that its advanced acceleration technology is now available as an add-on service for customers using Amazon CloudFront, the Content Delivery Network (CDN) from Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Strangeloop Site Optimizer is a service, available immediately to Amazon CloudFront customers, which applies front-end optimization (FEO) techniques automatically across websites, resulting in pages that load up to twice as fast for desktop and mobile browsers.

Site Optimizer transforms FEO from a complex manual coding process to an automated function performed in real time by an intelligent system. Combining content delivery with front-end transformation is a natural marriage for site owners who care about delivering the fastest possible user experience to their online customers. While CDNs shorten server round trips, FEO reduces page requests and payload. Combined, the two solutions have a dramatic impact on page load. By itself, a CDN implementation can cut load times by half. Adding the Strangeloop Site Optimizer to the mix typically halves load times yet again.

“We chose Amazon CloudFront because of its ability to offer competitive content delivery compared to other higher-cost CDN services,” said Dan Wacksman, Senior Vice President of Global Distribution, Outrigger Hotels and Resorts, which currently manages, owns and/or operates 45 properties in Hawaii, the greater Pacific region, and Asia. “We chose Strangeloop’s Site Optimizer service because of its proven expertise in the area of front-end optimization. Together, Amazon CloudFront and Strangeloop cut our page load times in half instantly for both mobile and desktop visitors, without requiring any changes to our site or servers.”

“Strangeloop’s Site Optimizer service for front-end optimization (FEO) solution complements the Amazon CloudFront content delivery service,” said Alex Dunlap, Senior Manager of CloudFront, AWS. “Speed of delivery at an affordable cost is a key principle behind Amazon CloudFront. While Amazon CloudFront optimizes low latency delivery of static, dynamic, or streaming content using a global network of edge locations, Strangeloop’s Site Optimizer tackles page performance at the front end, speeding up page rendering in the browser. We are excited that the two services together will help customers offer an even better experience to their end-users while visiting their web applications.”

Between 80-85% of end-user response time happens at the front end: front-end problems include too many round trips, too many bytes, poor caching, and poor rendering. Front-end optimization (FEO) optimizes HTML to speed up page rendering, using practices such as compressing images, consolidating resources, rewriting object names, re-ordering when/how objects are rendered, re-ordering when scripts are executed, opening more concurrent browser connections, and leveraging the browser cache.

Site Optimizer optimizes the HTML pages themselves, by rewriting them as needed, in the process creating a number of optimized resources (images/css/javascript/etc.) that the rewritten pages will reference. Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver all these optimized resources, as the CDN, from locations closest to the actual clients.

“We’re thrilled to be working with the technical team at AWS,” said Jonathan Bixby, CEO, Strangeloop Networks. “As the world’s largest, most secure, most robust cloud service platform they’re in a strategic position to bring advanced front-end optimization to site owners who would otherwise not have access to the aggressive FEO toolset that the current online marketplace demands. We are extremely excited about the opportunity to continue to work with this fantastic platform.”