Protect Your Site Infrastructure With Bypass

Things break. This is a fact of life. When your site stops functioning and adversely affects revenue streams, the scramble begins. So how do you protect your infrastructure when you have vendors that manage your traffic? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could rule out quickly what interactions are the cause?

What we call Bypass Mode is a mechanism that gracefully moves traffic away from from third party vendors and does not interrupt your site’s ability to serve content. It’s a failover that ensures the operations, security, and performance of your site are never compromised — even when disruptions occur. It is IT operations’ responsibility to anticipate break points and develop action plans and you shouldn’t be caught off guard when there is a crisis.

How It Works

The mechanics of Bypass differ slightly depending on how you are deployed but the result is the same. Here is a look at how the mechanism works in basic deployment, with SiteSpect as your example vendor:

As you can see, traffic routes from a visitor’s browser directly to the SiteSpect cloud via DNS. SiteSpect then proxies that request back to your origin for content. Now, let’s look at what the traffic flow looks like when Bypass mode is invoked:

Traffic is now routing directly to your origin, i.e. SiteSpect is removed (or Bypassed) entirely. Bypass works on the DNS layer. Our systems automatically update DNS so that traffic routes from a visitor’s browser directly to your origin.

How To Turn It On

Invoking Bypass should be simple. Each SiteSpect deployment is configured with a Heartbeat object. This object is a file on your web server infrastructure. Our systems send regular requests through the SiteSpect Cloud for that object. As long as that object responds with a “200 OK” response code, then traffic is routed to SiteSpect.

To invoke Bypass, simply remove or rename that object. Bypass will automatically kick in and be fully in effect within 3 to 5 minutes. Once you are ready to restore traffic to SiteSpect, simply restore that object. Bypass will automatically be removed and traffic will be routing to SiteSpect again with 5 to 7 minutes. This capability means that no matter what the source of the problem, you can streamline and simplify your traffic to better diagnose and resolve the issue.

Easily remove SiteSpect to isolate the problem and then safely restore traffic — this is the beauty of Bypass. Having this feature in your action plan will help you mitigate the business impact of future production issues, because as we all know, they will happen.

If you would like to learn more about your specific Heartbeat configuration or other troubleshooting tips, email us at helpdesk@sitespect.com and call 617-859-1900 x702.