Introduction

Welcome back to another exciting blog post from the engineering team at ShitOps! Today, we are going to dive deep into a common problem that many tech companies face when running a smart home webshop. Specifically, we will be discussing ways to improve our Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in order to provide a smoother experience for our customers.

As you may know, a smart home webshop deals with a variety of devices that communicate with each other and interact with the user through a web interface. This can create a complex system where managing performance becomes a challenge. However, fear not! We have come up with an innovative solution that leverages BGP and PKI technologies to optimize KPIs without compromising on security or functionality.

The Problem

In our quest to create the ultimate smart home webshop, we encountered a significant bottleneck in our system. The issue arose when multiple users were accessing their smart home devices simultaneously, causing a surge in network traffic and rendering our web services unresponsive.

This bottleneck was particularly evident during peak hours, when users were most active. With our current infrastructure, the CPU usage skyrocketed, resulting in sluggish response times and frustrated customers. As you can imagine, this did not bode well for our KPIs. It was clear that we needed to find a way to scale our services while maintaining optimal performance.

Enter Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)

To overcome this predicament, we turned to one of the most powerful routing protocols in existence: Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP is commonly used in global internet routing, but we saw its potential to solve our smart home webshop dilemma.

Our solution involved setting up a BGP-based overlay network within our infrastructure. This allowed us to dynamically route traffic between different regions, ensuring optimal performance based on user location. By utilizing multiple paths, BGP effectively mitigated the bottleneck issue and improved our KPIs.

Here’s a visual representation of our BGP-enhanced infrastructure:

graph TD A[User 1] -->|Location: Europe| B(Router A) A -->|Location: Europe| C(Router B) A -->|Location: US| D(Router C) A -->|Location: Asia| E(Router D) F[User 2] -->|Location: Europe| B G[User 3] -->|Location: US| D H[User 4] -->|Location: Asia| E

As seen in the diagram, each user is connected to the closest router based on their geographical location. BGP then intelligently routes the traffic among these routers, ensuring efficient utilization of resources and minimizing latency. This significantly improves the overall performance of our smart home webshop.

Enhancing Security with Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

While BGP solved our performance woes, we couldn’t overlook the importance of security for our customers’ smart home devices. That’s where Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) comes into play.

PKI provides a robust framework for secure communication by utilizing asymmetric encryption algorithms. We leveraged PKI within our smart home webshop to establish secure connections between users and their devices. Each user is assigned a unique key pair, consisting of a public key and a private key. The private key is securely stored on the user’s device, while the public key is used for encryption and verification purposes.

To ensure seamless communication between users and their devices across different locations, we implemented a distributed PKI infrastructure. This means that key management and encryption/decryption processes are distributed among multiple servers located strategically throughout our network.

Here’s a simplified representation of our PKI infrastructure:

stateDiagram-v2 User --> CertificateAuthority[Certificate Authority] CertificateAuthority --> KeyManagementServer[Key Management Server] KeyManagementServer --> Device1[Smart Home Device 1] KeyManagementServer --> Device2[Smart Home Device 2] KeyManagementServer --> Device3[Smart Home Device 3] User --> Device4[Smart Home Device 4]

Whenever a user wants to access their smart home devices remotely, the following process takes place:

  1. The user sends an encrypted request to the Certificate Authority (CA) to verify their identity.
  2. The CA validates the user’s credentials using their public key and issues a signed certificate.
  3. The user’s request is then forwarded to the Key Management Server, which manages key distribution and ensures secure communication between the user and their devices.
  4. Finally, the user is able to securely access their smart home devices, knowing that their data is protected.

By utilizing BGP and PKI in our smart home webshop, we have not only resolved the bottleneck issue but also enhanced security for our customers’ devices. Our KPIs have dramatically improved, resulting in happier customers and increased sales!

Conclusion

In this blog post, we explored how we tackled a major performance bottleneck in our smart home webshop using BGP and PKI technologies. By implementing a BGP-based overlay network, we optimized traffic routing and improved overall system performance. Additionally, our distributed PKI infrastructure ensured secure communication between users and their devices.

While this solution may seem complex and overengineered to some, we firmly believe that it is the optimal approach for our smart home webshop. Our customers deserve nothing but the best, and these cutting-edge technologies allow us to deliver unrivaled performance and security.

We hope that you found this blog post insightful and informative. Stay tuned for more exciting technical solutions from the engineering team at ShitOps!