This post, is based upon a session I had for a partner in Norway. How can we use Netscaler to optimize web content?
Let’s face it, the trends are chaging
* Users are becoming less patient (meaging that they demand that applications/services respond quicker. (more then 40% of users drop out if the website takes mroe then 5 – 10 seconds to load) think about how that can affect a WebShop or eCommerce site ?
* More and more mobile traffic (Mobile phones, ipads, laptops. Communicating using 3G/4G or WLAN for that matter) and to that we can add that there is more data being sent across the network as well. Site web applications become more and more complex, with more code and more components as well.
* More demands to availability (Users are demaing that services are available at almost every hour. If we think about it about 5 – 10 years ago, if something was down for about 10 min we didn’t think that much about it, but now ?
* More demands to have secure communication. It wasn’t that long ago that Facebook and Google switched to SSL as default when using their services. With more and more hacking attempts happening online it requires a certain amount of security.
So what can Netscaler do in this equation ?
* Optimizing content with Front-end optimization, Caching and Compression
With the latest 10.5 release, Citrix has made a good jump into web content optimization. With features like lazy loading of images, HTML comment removal, minify JS and inline CSS. And adding it that after content is being optimized the content can be compressed using gZIP or DEFLATE and sent across the wire (NOTE: that most web servers like Apache and IIS support GZIP and Deflate but it is much more efficient to do this on a dedicated ADC)
And with using Caching to store often accessed data it makes the Netscaler a good web optimization platform.
* Optimizing based upon endpoints.
With the current trend and more users connecting using mobile devices which are using the internett with a wireless conenction. If needs a better way to communicate as well. A god example here is TCP congeston. On a wireless you have a higher amount of packet loss and this requires using for instance TCP Congestion Westwood which is much better suites on wireless connections. Also using features like MTCP (on supported devices) allows for higher troughput as well. And that we can place different TCP settings on different services makes it much more agile.
* High availability
Using features like load balancing and GSLB allows us to deliver a high availabilty and scale solution. And using features like AppQOE to allows us to prioritize traffic in a eCommerce setting might be a valuable asset. Think the scenario if we have a web shop, where most of our buying customers come from a regular PC while most mobile users that are connecting are mostly checking the latest offers. If we ever where to reach our peak in traffic it is useful to prioritize traffic based upon endpoint connecting.
* Secure content
With Netscaler it allows us to create specific SSL profile which we can attack to different services. For instance older applications which are used by everyone might not have the high requirement regarding security, but on the other hand PCI-DSS requires a high level of security. Add to the mix that we can handle many common DDoS attacks on TCP level and on HTTP. We can also use Application firewall which handles many application based attacks, when an own learning feature it can block users which are not following the common user pattern on a website. And that we can specify common URLs which users are not allowed to access.
So to summerize, the Netscaler can be a good component to optimizing and securing traffic, with a lot of exiting stuff happening in the next year! 
stay tuned.