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In this episode of The New Stack Makers, we talk to Kris Beevers about the importance of the traffic manager role and so much more as we look ahead to this year in enterprise tech. Seven years ago, Beevers co-founded NS1, the networking automation company or, as he calls it, “the system of record for many, many of the key domains and the applications on the Internet today.”

He says that each of us interacts with NS1 dozens of times a day, like when we are connecting on LinkedIn or sharing files on DropBox.

NS1 sits at the base of this new traffic management stack, steering that traffic across our increasingly complex and distributed systems. This stack also includes content networking delivery networks (CDN), load-balancing tooling, edge networking footprints, Service Mesh, service discovery, and egress optimization. This new role isn’t just about measuring if traffic is working correctly, but really understanding both your users and systems to know how traffic is reaching the application, if you’re using the right networking providers and venders, and if you’re choosing data centers, clouds and CDNs effectively.

This new traffic management role sits at the heart of greater site reliability engineering trends like chaos engineering and progressive delivery. It’s about using your tooling stack to understand how your whole tooling reacts to prepare for the worst.