NetActuate is the trusted infrastructure partner for the world’s most ambitious digital innovators. Our network, cloud, services, and team help our customers’ products take flight.  

So, why no “GET STARTED HERE” button to enter your credit card and deploy? 

Because global edge deployments are complex – all the more so when you add Anycast. BGP routing tables and global carrier and IX statuses change often, and with them so too can your edge application performance. Success at scale at the global edge requires a hands on approach, and with NetActuate this begins with our customer engagement.  

Our Engagement Model 

Our six-stage model defines how NetActuate collaborates with customers to ensure success. The remainder of this blog will go through each phase in the process and describe the key outcomes from each stage. 

1. Architecture Review

During the architecture review, we’ll dive deep into your needs and challenges. Beyond assessing existing infrastructure and identifying challenges, here’s what else typically happens in this phase:

• Understand Business Objectives: improving user experience, scaling to new regions, reducing costs, meeting compliance requirements, all of the above? 
• Evaluate Current Architecture:
  • Traffic patterns and volumes
  • Resource utilization and capacity planning
  • Current pain points (e.g., latency issues, bottlenecks, or outages)
  • Technology stack compatibility with NetActuate’s offerings
• Identify Gaps and Opportunities:
  • Spot inefficiencies, potential failure points, or areas where performance and cost optimization can be achieved
  • Evaluate readiness for multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure integration if applicable
• Define Regional Needs:
  • Assess where users are concentrated geographically and evaluate region-specific challenges, such as:
    • Regulatory or data sovereignty requirements
    • Bandwidth pricing differences
    • Connectivity challenges in specific markets
• Security and Compliance Review:
  • Ensure solutions meet industry and regional security standards and compliance requirements, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or ISO certifications.
• Outline Success Metrics:
  • Work with the customer to define KPIs and benchmarks for success, such as:
    • Reduce latency by X%.
    • Cost savings of Y% per GB of bandwidth.
    • Increased uptime or SLA fulfillment.

For straightforward cases, the architecture review can happen on a single call, while more complex scenarios can span a few calls with various NetActuate experts. We don’t skimp on this step because it’s vital to ensuring that everyone goes on to the next step (or we part ways as friends) with a complete and common understanding of the situation. #nosurprises! 

2. Review Budget and Fit

Based on the Architectural review, we can develop a detailed cost estimate that reflects deployment models (VM, Bare Metal, Colo, Anycast in any combination) in the customers’ target regions. In most cases we are at parity with or more cost-effective than other providers, and we offer a few unique approaches that really help you Grow Global. 

Take our PoP and Regional bandwidth pooling. Growth is not predictable – maybe one VM in a PoP exceeds the monthly bandwidth allotment, but the other 3 VMs in that PoP are far below it. You’ll pay expensive overages in that scenario with most providers, but as long as the total for all four VMs is under the shared total, you pay zero overages with NetActuate. And the same holds true when you have multiple PoPs in a region. 

“Thank you for your region-based bandwidth billing — This feature has been instrumental in scaling our operations. It’s truly been a pleasure working with NetActuate.”

– Amru Rahiman Komalath, CEO, 5centsCDN

3. Build Solution

Our solutions are designed to optimize performance and reliability for customer applications. Everyone uses databases, load balancers, caches, and various cloud services, but no two companies use them the same way. This is why we’ve designed everything about our network and stack to be modular, so we can quickly build a custom network edge solution to meet your needs. 

During this phase, we’ll partner to plan for scalability and redundancy by designing an architecture that ensures:

• Room for growth as you scale
• Redundant pathways and failover mechanisms to maximize uptime.

This takes a variety of shapes. Maybe it’s working to enable a new OS image (NixOS is the latest one we’ve added in partnership with DevZero). In other cases, we work with our customers, and sometimes with their customers, to architect custom network solutions, such as direct cross-connects to ensure solution uptime even in the event of loss of public internet connectivity.

Many applications have clustering or other design requirements that need to be re-architected when scaling to serve global users. This was the situation Amru Rahiman Komalath, CEO of 5centsCDN faced. Integrating their newly-expanded global nodes into a single SQL controller for their Galera cluster was producing timeouts and connectivity issues between dispersed PoPs. NetActuate partnered with Amru and his team to reorganize their cluster structure and group geographically closer nodes together. This eliminated the database sync issues caused by long-distance connections between PoPs.   

4. Go Live: POC in Production

When your goal is reliable application delivery in 10ms or less in all your target markets, live is the only way to tune the deployment. NetActuate guides customers through a free 30-day POC deployment to test the solution in real-world conditions. Our POCs typically start with a small deployment in a single or small number of PoPs to validate the setup before expanding to additional PoPs. We only charge for the POC if there is custom development work required.

The goal is to get the POC into production quickly, rather than just testing in a lab environment. This is because the POC is the only way to get the deployment right given the multiple variables:

• Anycast architecture – The anycast routing is often a critical part of the service, and this can only be properly tested in a live production environment.
• Real-world traffic – Testing with actual customer traffic and load is important to see how the system performs in a real-world scenario.
• Feature validation – Customers can better validate the full set of features and functionality when testing in their actual production environment, rather than a simulated lab.

To set you up for success, our DevOps engineers will develop and handover custom Terraform and/or Ansible playbooks and provision an initial deployment on our network for you to deploy your stack. 

Did we mention these playbooks are custom? One recent customer required a unique solution to manage two independent BGP groups for separate ASNs, a feature not covered by their standard playbook. We partnered to create a custom Ansible playbook for the initial configuration that allowed for the creation of the global service cluster with a customized BGP announcement strategy.

This solution allowed them to:

• Configure BGP daemons on both ASNs across all their machines.
• Control which PoPs were announcing specific prefixes for each ASN, offering more granular control over routing.

5. Team Integration (ChatOps)

Questions inevitably arise during the POC. How do I get a custom image deployed? What OSes are supported? How do I add my own IP space to the Terraform playbook? Why is my Galera cluster sync timing out? Real-time collaboration ensures rapid resolution of questions. Once the POC rolls into commercial production, all NetActuate Anycast customers have 24x7x365 chatops access to our experts, and optional vNOC support if desired. 

As your trusted infrastructure partner, we consider ourselves an extension of your team. When you work with NetActuate, you have on-demand access to the most experienced network and peering engineers in the industry.

6. Ongoing Optimization

NetActuate’s proactive optimization helps scale your network while maintaining cost-efficiency and performance as your user base grows and you add features.

For example, when one large customer expressed interest in collaborating to improve network visibility, we mapped out ways to expose dashboards and reporting tools that provide detailed visibility into the traffic and performance of their networks. This includes analyzing things like:

• Top source IPs, destination ports, TCP flags, etc. to identify potential issues or attacks
• Geographic analysis to spot routing inefficiencies or gaps in coverage
• Hypervisor metrics to identify resource constraints

This collaboration will soon produce:

• Access to our Grafana dashboards, with appropriate security controls
• A customer-facing reporting dashboard in the NetActuate portal that can provide recommendations, alerts, etc.

The goal is to empower our customers to proactively identify opportunities for optimization, such as:

• Adding new PoPs in underserved regions to improve latency
• Adjusting routing or capacity based on traffic patterns
• Identifying potential security issues early

Conclusion

Our hands-on engagement process reflects NetActuate’s commitment to being more than just a service provider—we’re a true partner in our customers’ success. From the initial architectural review to ongoing optimization, every phase is designed to deliver tailored, scalable, and cost-effective solutions that align with your goals. By combining technical expertise, collaborative integration, and proactive support, we ensure our customers can confidently scale their operations, improve performance, and stay ahead in an ever-evolving digital landscape.