March 2021 Summaries

Azion's new serverless computing product, Edge Functions, leverages Google's V8 Engine to enhance performance, security, and cost-efficiency by running JavaScript and WebAssembly code at the edge of the network. The V8 Engine, known for its fast garbage collection, hidden classes, inline caching, and fine-grained sandboxing, efficiently compiles high-level JavaScript into machine code, allowing Edge Functions to execute with reduced latency and resource use compared to traditional serverless solutions like AWS Lambda. By utilizing multitenancy, Azion eliminates the need for containerization, thus avoiding cold starts and enabling functions to scale automatically at the closest edge node to the user. This results in lower operational costs and improved performance, making Edge Functions suitable for various applications, such as modernizing legacy systems and building low-latency, event-driven applications. Edge Functions with JavaScript support is now accessible to all Azion users, promoting ease of use and agility in developing edge-native applications.

Azion is committed to enhancing internet security by partnering with the Internet Society's MANRS initiative, which aims to address vulnerabilities in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that can lead to routing mishaps and security breaches. The MANRS initiative promotes a set of four key practices—coordination, filtering, anti-spoofing, and global validation—to improve the security of internet routing. These practices are designed to be widely implemented by CDNs, cloud providers, and edge computing companies to create a safer and more stable internet infrastructure. Azion, alongside major industry players like Cloudflare, AWS, and Google, is actively working to implement and promote these standards, emphasizing the collaborative effort needed to secure global routing. By integrating MANRS practices into their Azion Edge Traffic Router and urging peers to adopt these measures, Azion aims to make MANRS as essential to internet security as BGP itself, ensuring that internet protocols evolve to meet new security challenges.