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Equifax and AWS: How One Minor Thing Can Pull Down Performance

Apr 16, 20183 min read

Written by

David O'Neill

COO / CCO

David oversees operations and customer success at APIContext, helping enterprise clients get measurable value from API monitoring.

It's always fascinating to us how your choice of Cloud Host can impact your performance. For example, we noticed some issues with the Equifax API we monitor. There are a lot of issues. Over the last week alone, there have been protracted periods when the endpoint doesn't respond to queries at all which affected everyone. However, we did notice a significant difference in latency between the 4 major clouds. AWS calls were, on average, almost 1.5 seconds longer than calls made from other clouds. When we drilled into this, we could see that for some reason DNS calls made to the Equifax servers from applications hosted on AWS nodes around the USA were the culprit. There could be several reasons for this, but it's something they should be aware of and make developers aware of. To see a copy of our insights report for this call, complete the form below.

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