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Akamai -- The Other Huge Distributed System
Frisky070802 writes "Technology Review, the MIT alumni magazine, has an article by Simson Garfinkel that compares the huge distributed systems run by Google and Akamai and speculates that Google might even consider buying Akamai. It also discusses the flame-out of Akamai after its tremendous IPO."
I think there's plenty of room for both groups to be successful. One thing Google and Akamai have in common is their desire to hire extremely skilled people instead of making it up with large numbers of code monkeys.
;-)
I assume this is true, at least, because at some point each of these companies have hired a friend of mine.
"TV is great! Every New Year's I make a resolution to watch more TV." - Ann Coulter
According to this Google already outsources their DNS load balancing to Akamai.
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
There has been lots of speculation on google lately...they might offer stock, they might design their own operating system, why do we enjoy so much speculation about google? C'mon they're busy with Gmail and their secrecy will always out do our guessing.
:(){
Akamai Technologies lost co-founder and CTO Daniel C. Lewin on American Airlines Flight 11.
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http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/146
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
Didn't one of Akamai's executives (a founder maybe?) die in the September 11 attacks? Did that have any effect on Akamai's stock performance?
One of the founders, the CTO, was on American Airlines flight 11, which hit the WTC. No mention of what happened to the stock, but it sure hit company morale hard.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Google would only have to report that information to its shareholders who could sit on it if they wanted to... however, if any shareholder wants to sell, then anybody they talk to about selling the shares would have to get the "true" info too.
Since there's no NDA at all possible, the secrecy would likely crumble very quickly if the shares are all but very thinly traded.
ok.... I'll byte...
.80 you would have $7280.... ....or 661.81 12 packs of the old nunber "6"
If you had $650 a year and a half ago and bought akamai at @
Google is hardly a monopoly. There are almost no barriers to entry in their market. There is lots of healthy competition (Altavista, Yahoo, AOL, MSN). I repeat: there are almost no barriers to entry in their market.
The case for Microsoft is 180-degrees in the opposite direction.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
On the other hand, if someone were to have $650 laying around and bought 915 shares of Akamai in September of 2002, they would have $12,746 now.
The point is because they have an employee compensation scheme (plus lots of VC investors) that lets so many employees 'invest' in the company the SEC will treat them like a listed company. That is fact. So if they are going to be treated like a listed company and get none of the benefit why not just get listed.
That is what the parent said. It doesn't matter that no one can invest in it... it is treated as having the entire public as potential investors by the SEC (the reason being lots of people (mainly staff by numbers) have an investment in the company).
To suggest nearly nobody reads reports, though, is pathetic. Share options in your employer, your annual insurance and savings plan reports... If you don't look after your money I hope you don't cry to the government when someone does funny things with it (WorldCom, Putnam, who else?)...
Maybe so, but as the poster above pointed out, they may have to behave like a public company, and so, may go IPO if they lose the benefits of being private.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
...at least from a customer's prospective.
We're one of Akamai's larger customers.
We use them because the traffic patterns on our websites include 10x (and up) spikes in traffic during news and weather events.
These events are specifically times when we CANNOT be unavailable. We live and die by those events.
But, those events are not very often - perhaps a few per month.
Akamai allows us to serve this massive traffic spikes without requring us to maintain a massive overhead in servers and bandwidth that goes unused most of the time.
Each site in our network has a geographically localized audience, but across the network as a whole, we have users everwhere.
Edge Serving allows us to provide extremely low latency service to all of those users - and providing a much greater resistance to core internet connection issues.
Further, Akamai provides us with massive redundancy. A single (or group of few) datacenter, not matter how large and well designed, is still not as redundant as the Akamai network.
Finally, if our origins become unavailable for whatever reason, our sites live on, completely available on the edge (albeit, growing stale as time goes on) while we restore origin connectivity.
Then we have EdgeJava, Akamai Network Storage, the video serving, etc.
Our latest web project (which will become quite popular in mid-late August) will be served entirely from the Edge using Akamai.
No, I think you've missed the point of Akamai. Akamai is in the delivery business, but bandwidth is only part of that. Akamai delivers content, and is capable of delivering CPU cycles as well. You have also forgotten about the other last mile: the content provider's Internet connection. Most people don't go buying themselves a direct-backbone connection to put up their websites- that's left to their ISP or their ISP's ISP.
Take, for example, a website linked to in a Slashdot front-page article. The HDD cannon today seems to have been hosed pretty badly by the Slashdot Effect. First problem was that the provider's bandwidth was not nearly enough to serve what was apparently a graphics-heavy page (I don't know- I never even got to see it!). The second problem was that even if it had been a simple page, it still takes a fair amount of power to serve a large number of simultaneous requests.
Had that web site operator used Akamai's services, the Slashdot Effect might not have been able to make the content unavailable. Instead of one last mile to the provider being clogged, the traffic is distributed among all of Akamai's "last miles". At the same time, no one server has to cope with answering all those requests in a timely manner.
Google can get away with a few datacenters full of servers. The bandwidth to any one Google datacenter can probably be planned for and new pipes provisioned pretty readily as they grow and expand services. Akamai is there for other uses- for example, hosting video streams of immensely popular but short-shelf-lifed sporting events. If the sanctioning body for a sport invested in enough infrastructure to provide it themselves, it would be underutilized out of season. If Akamai does it, they can host video streams of the baseball World Series for MLB, then the Superbowl for the NFL, then March Madness for the NCAA, and those organizations don't have servers sitting around twiddling virtual thumbs in the off season.
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
In September 2001, Akamai's stock had already plummetted to a fraction of its peak value. The price finally bottomed out about a year later and has been slowly climbing back up ever since.
Speedera, for one.
Mod point free since 2001
Back during the Internet boom, there were also some companies that did satellite multicast to ~600 servers around North America, which competed with some of the kinds of things Akamai is used for. (But that was the boom, and those guys are gone now.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Technology Review is the MIT Alumni magazine. Akamai was founded by MIT professors and alumni, and employs many MIT alums. Technology Review hypes Akamai... hmm, I'll leave you to do the math there.
Ah, but the grandparents point is that given the same number of CPU's and the same amount of agregate bandwidth the same task can be performed no matter if the servers are at the edge or the core. He asserts that core bandwidth is super cheap and so agregate bandwidth is achievable at the core. This ignores a large part of Akami's business model which is that they don't pay ISP's for edge bandwidth! I know that my ISP was happy to get an Akami cluster on their LAN because it saved them peering cost for Akami hosted high bandwidth content that their customers were viewing. Heck I don't think they even charged them for power and AC =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Unfortunately my numbers for the 1024 bit key are not correct. It would take them significantly longer than a year to break a 1024 bit key. The 512 key (12 times a day) is still pretty substantial, though - used widely in hardware crypto systems.
:-)
See Bulletin #13 from RSA Labs for a decent machine-cost analysis of breaking larger keys.
"There, I said it, can you please put the gun away now?"
-Adam
From the last time I posted:
Use dig. When I run 'dig www.google.com', I see this:
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.com. 3600 IN CNAME www.google.akadns.net.
www.google.akadns.net.&nb sp; 300 IN A 64.233.167.99
www.google.akadns.net. 300 IN A 64.233.167.104
Slashdot won't let me post the whole output due to their filters, but try it yourself.
For more information, click here.
whois akadns.net
Registrant:
Akamai Technologies, Inc.
8 Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142
US
Domain name: AKADNS.NET
wow, now was that so hard?
There's actually plenty of competitors for Akamai's product -- it's one of the reasons they're having such trouble getting to profitability. It turns out that a static edge caching service is, while tricky, not quite rocket science, and several companies have done it: off the top of my head, Speedera, Globix, and Digital Islands (or whoever owns them now; probably level3).
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Back a few years ago (company was doing about 50Mbps sustained through Akamai) AT&T came and pitched us on how they were just as good as Akamai - except that they didn't actually have a large network of servers yet - just a couple here and a couple oversees - but that don't worry they were well-connected servers and could buy more someday.
Was quite the surreal experience. I think they really just wanted us to switch phone hosting facilities (were using MCI).