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Your Website Comes From 1,000 Places. Here’s How to Map Them

Over the past decade, the business of loading a webpage has become devilishly complicated. Websites are now really a cocktail of services delivered by advertising networks, authentication services, security services, and content delivery partners.

But DeepField — a startup based in Ann Arbor, Michigan with an impressive internet pedigree — aims to make sense of it all.

You’re reading this article on Wired.com, but much of the page isn’t being served by Wired’s servers. In fact, you’re probably interacting with close to 20 of Wired’s partners behind the scenes, including companies like Amazon, Rackspace, and Comscore.

Most of these services make the web more efficient. You can comment on Wired articles using the Disqus comment system, for example, which in turn allows you to log in using Twitter, Facebook or Google+. And content delivery networks like Akamai and Edgecast speed up the web by caching parts of our webpages closer to the people who are reading them.

But this emerging internet supply chain complicates things, and that breeds a host of new places for problems to pop up. When a storm disrupted a pair of Amazon data centers in Virginia a month ago, Netflix viewers across the country were unable to watch movies. In 2009, the New York Times ended up serving fraudulent advertisements to readers after criminals talked their way onto an ad network used by the site. They thought the ads were for Vonage.

Networks used to be “pretty simple,” says Craig Labovitz, president and co-founder of DeepField, the 10-person startup that’s made it a mission to map out the internet’s supply chain. “You’d go to an address and it was running on a server somewhere,” he says. But not so today. “The cloud has really enabled things to be everywhere and anywhere.”

That can make it tough for the biggest players on the internet — large service providers, cloud companies, or big businesses — to get a clear picture of who really is using their networks for what. Only a tiny fraction of Netflix’s traffic runs through its own servers, and it can be tricky for a company like AT&T to figure out how much of the traffic on Amazon’s cloud or on Level 3′s content delivery network belongs to Netflix.

This also matters to big businesses, who may have bottlenecks or dependencies in their internet supply chain that they don’t even know about. “All these pieces have to be aligned, and if they’re not aligned properly your users may be going across the country or going to overloaded services,” Labovitz says.

DeepField has developed a network-mapping technology — they call it the Cloud Genome — that can make sense of this mix of internet services. DeepField makes money by selling virtual appliances that run in their clients data centers and help them decode what’s going on in their networks.

We asked DeepField to map Wired’s supply chain, and you can see the results in the graphic to the right (we supplied no inside information).

Labovitz’s special talent is figuring out what’s going on behind the scenes on the internet. Twenty-five years ago, he was one of the guys who kept the routers running on the NSFNet (National Science Foundation Network), when it was the internet’s backbone.
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He put in a decade at network security vendor Arbor Networks, before quietly founding DeepField in 2011. This is the first time that DeepField has talked about its business plans.

The company wouldn’t tell us who is using its service, but it says it has some paying customers right now and is being tested by more than a dozen companies.

Only select customers are using DeepField right now, but in about a month, the company is going to open up its products to a public beta.

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