Recently, the Clockwork team sponsored both Google Cloud Next ‘24 and Cisco Live in Las Vegas. We had the pleasure of talking to hundreds of people who stopped by our booth to chat about their challenges managing hybrid, multi-cloud networks, and discuss Cloud Deluxe, Clockwork’s congestion control solution.
One challenge we heard repeatedly was the need for Quality of Service (QoS) to address performance degradation when primary workloads are disrupted by resource contention from concurrent tasks like backups, observability, and security processes. If this resonates with you, we’d love to learn more in this quick survey.
Clockwork’s Bandwidth Slicer addresses this pain point as a dynamic QoS panel that allows you to automatically allocate bandwidth across applications and traffic types through an intuitive software interface or via API. There’s no hardware configuration required – no need to manually program network switches or firewalls to differentiate primary workloads and ensure crucial applications have the necessary bandwidth.
Let’s say you have 5 apps running on a cluster of 100 nodes, all sharing the same underlying network bandwidth. App A is your primary workload. It is customer-critical, and should get 90% of the bandwidth, especially in the morning. The secondary and tertiary workloads, like Datadog agents, Crowdstrike agents, Spark jobs – all of which collect large amounts of data – are still important but not as high-priority. However, they move a lot of data around in the cluster and can’t interfere with the user-facing App A.
Bandwidth Slicer lets you easily allocate bandwidth in this scenario so App A’s primary workload doesn’t compete with the secondary and tertiary ones and is guaranteed priority. With our work conservation feature, unused allocated bandwidth is redistributed among the other apps so no bandwidth is wasted. Configuration happens at the edge, so no access to the underlying infrastructure is required – it works on public clouds, hybrid, multi-cloud, as well as on-prem deployments.
We will be heading to more events this year (with our ever-popular glowing bouncy balls), including Gartner’s IT Symposium in Orlando this fall, and Millennium Alliance’s invite-only Digital Enterprise CIO Transformation Assemblies. Let us know if you’ll be attending too – we’d love to meet up.