Sitting between you and web pages …

By: Amit Chaudhary

What is Silk?

• A web browser• Developed by

Amazon• Launched on

November 15, 2011

Features

• A High Configuration Cloud• Dynamic Splitting• Persisting Connections• Page Indexes (Limitless Cache)• Optimized Content Delivery• Machine Learning

Existing ScenarioCurrently, all gadgets (tablets, PCs, PDAs, etc) process the webpages at different speeds, therefore time taken by a cell-phone to render the page will be more than the same task done by PCs.

High Configuration Cloud

Your device has some limits like low processor (700MHz), less main memory (512 MB), but Amazon Cloud has no limits.

- More than 600 GB RAM- 8-Core CPUs- Optical Network

So, the hurdles to access the webpages of size more than 10MB, are completely removed by SILK as all the computing is done on Cloud and not on your device.

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Webpages do not just contain text, but loads of images, CSS, display information, HTML, and many more to name.

Today’s webpages are rich in design but also consume more processing at the user end. The device may not be able to satisfy the needs of webpage, at that time you are stuck with the term “Loading” which will never end unless you close your browser and make the request again

Dynamic SplittingHere, SILK decides which components of the page need to be rendered by the device and which by the cloud. As you can see in the second image, except networking, and collections, everything is given to the cloud to be processed.

How does it make decisions?

• Amazon has a long history of predicting what its users will like based on browsing habits

• It will be collecting enormous amounts of information from its users to determine traffic pattern to guess where the user might go next

• Silk’s EC2 component will decide which files are worth handling on their servers and the rest will be loaded as usual

Persistent ConnectionsWhen you load a webpage, the resources that you find on that page are not from the same server.

Different elements like RSS feeds, links of other pages, videos from YouTube, images from Picasa, documents from Google Drive, etc. are stored on separate servers.

HTTP will make request to each server and bring you the content one by one, which causes you to wait for few more seconds than you dreamt of. In the image, a website takes about 1337 ms to load the whole page.

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Amazon SILK comes to rescue you here. It firsts gathers all the pages on its cloud, and compresses the content and then sends it as an envelope of data to you, creating illusion of only one path between you and your webpage.

So, now it takes only 5 micro seconds to load the same page that took 1337 ms without this feature.

Page Indexes

We have all studied the concept of cache memory, and we also know the pros and cons of it.

If I talk about advantages, then it stores all the recent browsed content/webpages, to avoid the round-trips to the server.

But on the other side of the coin, our device does have limited memory, so very less content can be accommodated. What to do if a device needs more?

Limitless cache

The solution to it is, that the cache is maintained by Amazon on its cloud; not even a single byte is occupied by your device. Your images, CSS, HTML pages, everything is cached, so whenever you tell your browser to request the same page that you did it before, it will load from the Amazon’s cache and not from yours.

Optimized Content Delivery

Have you ever downloaded the image? The obvious answer is YES. But how much time it takes to get that image on your gadget? Probably more. If the image is of lesser size, than it is downloaded in few seconds, even though you have 2G Plans, and what if the size is bigger, you will move a step back, not to download.

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And now, if you download the same image from the Amazon’s cloud, it will convert your file from MBs to KBs. In the image shown, a 3MB file is converted into 50KB.

This is one way to get the items quickly with a low cost (if your plan is not unlimited.)

Machine Learning

The prediction feature, I must say, is well applied by Amazon’s SILK.

It will determine your browsing pattern, and load the pages (on the cloud from different servers) even if you have not requested. But when you really need them …

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it will deliver the content to your browser upon the click of any link as if it was stored on the device.

But how is data transferred?

Silk reduces the average round-trip latency (using SPDY Protocol developed by Google) of wireless connections from 100 millisecond down to 5 milliseconds, and this is for all the stuff that resides outside of Amazon’s Web Services infrastructure. Sites hosted and files already stored on EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) or S3 (Simple Storage Service) are set at an even greater advantage

Now, what is this SPDY?

• An alternative to HTTP• HTTP is a very efficient at transferring an

individual file, but it was not designed to transfer a large number of small files efficiently

• For example, webpages with 60 or more images, CSS files, and external JavaScript are not unusual for high-profile Web Destinations

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• Loading all those individual files mostly takes time because of all overhead of separately requesting them

• In an attempt to avoid these issues, SPDY uses a single SSL-encrypted session between a browser and a client, and then compresses all the requests/response overhead

• The requests, responses, and data are all put into frames that are multiplexed over the one connection

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• This makes it possible to send a higher-priority small file without waiting for the transfer of a large file that’s already in progress to terminate

• Compressing the requests is helpful in typical ADSL/cable setups, where uplink speed is limited

• So, unnecessary duplicated headers in requests and responses are done away

Thank you guys …..

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