Steve Hoey
Passionate community builder, experienced team leader, talented designer & developer
This is a sampling of data visualizations and applications I developed for use as internal tools or by specific customers while at Akamai (2007-2020).
SureRoute™ Latency Improvements
Lead Designer and Developer
I collaborated with Akamai's Senior Research Scientist to develop this application to demonstrate the speed advantages provided by the company's SureRoute™ technology. Intended to be displayed on a large screen in the company's global Network Operations Centers, the application shows the speed of Akamai's traffic routing versus the routing available via the public Internet (specified by the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP). This visualization is intended for a technical audience, and does not include the contextualizing information that would be provided by the presenter or salesperson when it is shown.
I created custom JavaScript utilizing D3.js to render the map and to animate the routing lines. I used a combination of Bootstrap CSS framework, custom JavaScript, and custom HTML to create the page layout and to update the text in real time. The version of the visualization shown here is a pre-production version which includes "debug" functionality in the form of buttons on the lower right.
Click here to launch the visualization.
IPv4 Address Space Utilization
Lead Developer
Another visualization intended for a very technical audience, this display shows a high-level overview of how much traffic Akamai saw from each IPv4 address in a given month. Akamai's network includes hundreds of thousands of servers deployed in thousands of network locations across six continents. With such a large platform, Akamai sees traffic from billions of users daily. Every request served by Akamai comes from an IP address. IPv4 has been the dominant form of Internet address since the early 1990s, and remains prominent today, even as more traffic moves to the IPv6 address space.
This visualization is derived from analyzing more than six years of Akamai log data. It uses a color-coded display to show the amount of traffic seen by Akamai from every single address in the IPv4 address space. Each pixel in the image represents a cluster of 256 addresses. The overlaid boxes show the top-level address space assignments. For those curious, Ben Jojo has written an excellent explanation of the ipv4-heatmap software and its use of Hilbert Curves.
I used the ipv4-heatmap software from The Measurement Factory to create the high-level map of the Internet, and supplied it with data I extracted from analyzing Akamai log files. I used a variety of software packages including ffmpeg to create animated GIF and MP4 movie animations.
Click here to view the visualization.
Akamai Traffic Globe
Lead Developer
I created this visualization using Three.js and custom JavaSciprt as a proof-of-concept to show that Akamai's iconic “spinning globe” of real-time traffic delivery could be realized in a web browser. At the time I built this, the “spinning globe” was a custom piece of Windows-only software.
With browser support for WebGL now mainstream, I invite you to try the spinning globe for yourself!
ForceField Defense Report
Lead Designer and Developer
I lead the project to investigate the data logged by IP firewalls deployed on Akamai's machines worldwide. At the inception of this project, that log data was routinely destroyed, and was only looked upon as a source for debugging problems. I initiated global collection, retention, and processing of this data. After months of exploratory analysis (and after untangling the complicated set of rules that determined each machine's log sampling rate), I developed the design and layout of the dashboard shown here. With support from our infrastructure engineering team, I built and deployed this interactive interface that shows hourly trends of unwanted traffic being blocked by Akamai's machines. From this dashboard, we were able to learn about novel attack vectors, and to see in real time various DDoS and other kinds of malware campaigns as they unfolded.
I used Bootstrap for the CSS layout and D3.js along with custom JavaScript to produce the map graphic. I conducted exploratory data analysis using a combination of Unix command-line tools along with R. Production data on the server-side was stored in Hadoop, enabling users to impose arbitrary filters by Source Country, by Source Network, and Target Port. Often, the destination port and protocol of a blocked packet are indicative of a particular attack type in the case of malicious traffic. Custom Analytics engineers built a custom-designed back-end infrastructure to support interactive filtering of the data, allowing users to show only traffic from certain countries, networks, or to certain ports.
Due to the nature of the software required to power this interactive application, only the screenshot of the interface is available.
Global Internet Observer
Lead Designer and Developer
I designed and developed Akamai's Global Internet Observer as a viewing platform that displays global “health of the Internet” statistics, including measures of ping latency and loss, BGP route churn, and unwanted traffic. Modeled after a product I first produced for the US Air Force, the GIO software supports both interactive and kiosk modes. It was enthusiastically adopted for use in the National Cybersecurity and Communication Integration Center (NCCIC), part of the Cybersecurity Division of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is an agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
I created the design, and used ActionScript 3 and Adobe's Flex Builder to develop the interactive interface, and worked directly with Akamai Custom Analytics' infrastructure engineering lead to specify and develop the data feeds necessary to drive the display. Above is a photo of President Barack Obama being shown the Global Internet Observer at the NCCIC headquarters by Dr. Phyllis Schneck, then-Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications for the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), at the Department of Homeland Security.
Due to the nature of the software required to power this interactive application, only the screenshot of the interface is available.