It's the early 2010s, and Mohit Lad and Ricardo Oliviera are working late into the night, developing their ThousandEyes internet monitoring software in their startup's first office in San Francisco. The city is so energy conscious that the building's lights go out at 6 pm sharp, requiring a phone call and password to get everything back up and running. Oliviera has had enough and has written a script using Twilio, which offers APIs to automate phone calls.
It works for a week, until the lights turn themselves off again. After frantically debugging the script in the dark, the founders realize their script is fine. The problem is that Twilio is hosted in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center on the other side of the country, which was destroyed due to a storm.
Speaking of Austin, Texas in the year 2022, Lad believes it was a prophetic moment to describe how the Internet works today.
The changing internet
"Every time there's an Amazon outage, something breaks because the way applications are built right now, there are so many more API calls than ever before," he told TechRadar Pro.
"Previously, you would see, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, when you were building applications, you would put the code inside through libraries. Now you make an API call. An API call means that you insert a dependency on a provider that may be somewhere you don't know
"So as things come together, if there are outages in certain parts of the Amazon environment, what happens is even things that you don't anticipate will break, like your doorbell camera, it might not work. because they have an API call on Amazon."
"And I think one, a pattern that you'll start to find is that there's more and more unpredictability that will show up in terms of domino effects. When big networks or big hosts, cloud providers go down.
The best illustration of how the Internet has changed, according to Lad, is the movement of data stored on a company's premises to trusted cloud service providers such as AWS, Google Drive and Microsoft Azure, along with the data, usually as cost reduction measure. . That, and a familiar interface, are the most obvious benefits, but that also comes at a price.
"Companies used to put everything in their own data center," he says. “Now they go to the cloud, they don't control it. Before, they built their applications in-house, such as a CRM or HR application. And even that is now done in Salesforce, Workday, or Office 365. We use Teams, right? Teams is hosted in the cloud.
“The only thing that unites everything is the Internet. And if that doesn't work. Or some parts don't work, then it has a big impact on user experience. The entire concept of ThousandEyes was started because we believe that the quality of the Internet has an impact on the quality of life. »
software ThousandEyes
Part of what makes ThousandEyes indispensable to more than 170 Fortune 500 companies, the top ten banks in the United States, and customers like Mastercard, Volvo, and HP, is that it traces the paths between the core of the infrastructure company and the cloud providers that host that.
"Think Google Maps or Waze. It's all about providing a picture of what's going on between point A and point B, so you can make the right choice," says Lad. users and the application, which is missing in today's market world".
Lad argues that ThousandEyes remains a vital resource because of how the Internet works. “The Internet is essentially a collection of different networks. What ThousandEyes does is provide a view that shows that path and highlights if there's a failure somewhere, and that gives you the ability to fix it.
To illustrate, he shares what he calls "the 30,000-foot view" within the ThousandEyes software: a comprehensive overview of internet outages, with the estimated geographic impact represented on an interactive map.
Another example Lad gives of ThousandEyes' unique functionality is its ability to explore the exact source of a fault within a network. Randomly selects an outage in progress: A US provider is down, impacting Australian traffic, via Cloudflare.
"So if we go deeper, it looks like Sydney, and you can see specific parts of that network in Sydney, where the outages are," he explains. "And knowing that, if you're using that provider and you have critical customers in Australia, you actually know there's an outage in that part of the environment. You can bypass that network and make sure your users have a consistent experience and help them get out of a blind spot
Get Funding from ThousandEyes
Since the company was founded about a decade ago, Lad says the belief has only grown in importance. The road to get to where he and ThousandEyes are today has been a difficult one and, it seems, one last push. Lad's plans to enter academia at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) fizzled out and his US visa was about to expire. Something must be done.
In July 2008, Lad started working at an internet startup, but within two months he was told he was going to be laid off due to layoffs due to the financial crisis. This, he says, opened his eyes. Oliviera, his lab partner at UCLA, had asked him to go into business with him and he wasn't interested. The redundancy, Lad says, prompted him to take a chance, even though it seemed unlikely at first.
"Nobody was willing to fund ThousandEyes," he says. "A lot of people didn't think the internet would be big enough to look at. We ended up raising money from the National Science Foundation, the US government."
That initial €150,000 grant built the first version of ThousandEyes, but Lad is quick to point out that, in practice, it wasn't a life-changing sum of money. The first ThousandEyes data center, he says, was built in a garage with servers that had been dumped on the street. »
“One of the things that came out of a lot of equipment was put in recycling bins outside of businesses in the Bay Area. Even today we have the first server that we installed in our office.
The current state of funding tech startups isn't all that bleak, says Lad. "Last year was pretty crazy. Everybody was throwing a lot of money away. I think investors this year are more disciplined about fundamentals and they're pretty selective about where they invest and how they invest. And sometimes these changes in the market are a good opportunity to really understand where to focus.
"Take ThousandEyes as an example. If we had made a lot of money from day one, we would have tried all these different things to create a product and probably failed. The fact that we had very little money meant that we really had to focus on the only thing we could sell." And sometimes I feel like overfunded companies basically write their own failure when they raise too much money and try to grow faster.
“There is still a lot of money from investors. There are other government programs in different countries, and I would definitely encourage people to take advantage of them. . Sometimes these programs will not make you money quickly. distributed in installments every three months. But it helps you and puts more discipline in the way you trade. So, I think: look for alternative means.
"My recommendation for entrepreneurs building software companies is to focus on getting customers first. It's the best way to build the business, to validate the product.
predict internet
Committing to Internet monitoring also means committing to the idea that the Internet is constantly changing. That's the first thing Lad admits when asked about the unpredictability of ThousandEyes surveillance solutions. This change can be problematic, she says, since companies' own sense of self-preservation sometimes rules the Internet.
" also very complex, and not controlled by a single entity. Thus, each network makes decisions that are sometimes in its own interest. For example, networks sometimes advertise IP addresses that do not belong to them, and can attract traffic to their site, and that's how even big sites like Google have gone down. This is called BGP hijacking or route hijacking.”
"Even the best networks with the best engineers can't control availability because someone else on the Internet announces it's Google and traffic starts coming to them. That's part of what makes the Internet really fascinating and really hard to predict." .
ThousandEyes isn't losing hope by any means, and Lad says the company has developed technology that uses historical data to predict outages at certain times of day, not unlike the company's early days in San Francisco, but without having to wait for outages to occur before companies can respond.
"We can't predict all failures," he is quick to point out. “We will not predict if a lightning strike destroys a data center. But if there is a certain pattern that we can predict based on the above data, for example, at 9:00 am on a Tuesday you still have issues with Microsoft 365 from that office, but you won't have that issue if you switch from [internetservice[internetservice [serviceInternet[internetservice