review: Akamai

Akamai provides capacity over-provisioning, content caching, and load
balancing services for content providers on the Internet. For end
users, Akamai provides increased availability and decreased latencies.
Akamai achieves its goals by locating many small cluster systems at
various geographical locations along with their own DNS servers. When
content is requested, their DNS servers do not provide IP numbers from
a simple table lookup. Instead, their DNS servers measure several
factors, including the client's geographical location and server load,
to select an appropriate Akamai server.

I believe the greatest value that Akamai provides is capacity
over-provisioning. Though the average load may be a manageable amount
for many content providers to handle, flash-crowds are significantly
more difficult. If content providers wish to handle flash-crowds,
then they must always over-provision. The cost of this
over-provisioning (along with its technical support) can be
significant. Akamai has distributed servers which can provide this
over-provisioning factor. By providing this capacity to multiple
content providers, Akamai can provide this service at a price
significantly lower than the content providers' in-house
implementation. Thus, internally, Akamai over-provisions their
over-provisioning service (since it is unlikely all content providers
will experience flash crowds simultaneously).

This Akamai article is about experience and implementation, so it does
not contain any future work insights. What I found interesting is
that Akamai is not very transparent to content providers and network
providers. I assume Akamai must secure agreements to obtain access to
detailed BGP information from many autonomous system operators.
Content providers must also tailor their system to work with Akamai,
especially for dynamically generated content. Perhaps an interesting
topic would be finding ways to further automate the Akamai
infrastructure, to lower the barrier to entry for potential competing
solutions.
Received on Thu Oct 06 2005 - 09:49:43 EDT