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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."
Worldcom's major problem was that they couldn't keep their numbers straight about anything, and had a bad habit of lying to make them bigger. Google's habit is to lie to make the numbers smaller, to the point that they don't even check when compared to each other...
That's fine for Google's PR people to do today, but it'll never fly at a public company. And, the SEC's definition of "public company" doesn't quite require there to be an IPO, just simply having enough assets split among enough shareholders is enough to require all the same reporting standards that a company that has an exchange-traded stock has to live with.
So, this is one part of Google's culture that may be about to burst. You can't lie to your potential investors, and when you're a big enough company every member the entire public is considered a potential investor. These understatements are just plain going to have to start getting identified as such with cussioning words like "more than" or "over" coming before them in order to remain legal.
To be fair, there are important differences between Google and Akamai, differences that assure that Google won't be breaking into Akamai's business anytime soon, nor Akamai moving into Google's. Both companies have developed infrastructure for running massively parallel systems, but the applications that they are running on top of those systems are different. Google's primary application is a search engine. Akamai, by contrast, has developed a system for delivering Web pages, streaming media, and a variety of other standard Internet protocols.
Two businesses in completely different lines of work don't usually make good merger partners. They're neither competitors nor in a supplier/customer relationship.
To put it mildly... merging the Google network into the Akamai network would likely be a nightmare. They're doing two completely different things. There's just no sense trying to mix them. So, there's not much of a reason for Google to either hire or aquire Akamai. They're devising GMail for their own resources, I doubt that'd be an application that could instantly port over to Akamai.
They might make sense to be commonly owned, but there's certainly no way that common owner would want to mix the two networks.
Google & Akamai are similar in that they both use clusters of computers to do extremely high performance tasks. While there could be some great possibilities by combining the two, this is definitely not a "no brainer". Their models are different enough to make it difficult.
Akamai's business is distributing servers around the Internet, to maximize the efficiency of the web connections to them. They distribute the workload, and minimize the network distance needed for each person to connect. So, they need a large number of sites, each with a small number of servers (small relative to Google).
Google has a small number of sites, with a huge number of servers. Those servers are heavily dependent on one another. As mentioned in the article, they use Google's file system technology to aggregate to huge database. If that same structure was divided up into smaller chunks that were highly distributed, the back-end cluster performance would suffer because of the WAN links interconnecting them.
I'm sure Google will continue to grow, and create more data centers. But, they will need a different structure than Akamai uses.
I'm surprised they're not able to raise their prices to become profitable. I mean, where else is there to turn for something as strong as Akamai for a bursting-load application?
In any other industry, this might be true. I'm not sure it is true here.
Perhaps I'm being simplistic, but wouldn't it make some economic sense to be in the business of searching and indexing the very same web pages that you are already hosting? Wouldn't there be some cost savings? Some, gulp, synergies? Savings on hardware? Bandwidth? Optimizing your web hosting to make search more efficient or productive?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
You know, in the past few months, I've heard more about one company buying another company than I'd care to hear:
IBM will buy SCO
Apple will buy Real
Microsoft will buy everyone
And now this. Don't people realize there is more to 'buying' a company than ordering fries and a coke? Also, sometimes its advantages not to buy a company, but rather, to create a partnership, or even to just buy or license IPO.
The *other* way companies of similar persuasion exist at the same time, other than just eating each other, is to COMPETE.
That is the point of our economy. Rather than having large fish eat the small fish, and then be left with nothing but big fish and us (fish food), the big fish and the small fish should compete for our business by making their offerings more attractive.
"Simson Garfinkel ... speculates that Google might even consider buying Akamai"
Translation... Simson Garfinkel owns mountains of Akamai that's worth a fraction of what he paid for it during its IPO, and is hoping that his "speculation" drives its value up.
One of Akamai's hidden talents basically safely oversubscribe their systems because there's no way all of their customers can be at their peak resource usage at the same. Web usage is in part a zero-sum game... if thousands of people are running to their computer after being invited the same URL by a Super Bowl commercial, it's safe to assume that those thousands of people are not hitting CNN.com. Sure, some people not interested in the game might be at CNN's site, but they're not going to be part of the throng headed to the advertised site.
They don't really need to have enough systems so that every site can have its peak usage all at once. They just need to be able to absorb their market share of the entire World Wide Web activity at any given moment. They don't particularlly care which site you hit... they know that any spike at one is most likely going to come at the expense of other sites, and that they run a good chunk of those sites that are going to have the corrisponding decreases in traffic. They're basically assured that almost nobody downloads an iTunes song and watches a TechTV video clip at the same time.
The takeaway I got from the article wasn't Google buying Akamai, it was, as another poster mentioned, that there is no barrier to entry in the search market. If you couple that with taking advantage of Akamai's technology on the back end and some savvy, well-funded business people (their names begin with V & C), you could become the next Google, by beating Google at their own game and not have to worry about developing the underlying technology (which Google does).
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
No offence, but making 'clever' modifications to the Slashdot slogan is getting just a little tired out. :(
You mean apart from:
Developing superior (or even equivalent) indexing/searching software (mucho $)
Purchasing and housing sufficient hardware resources to make that software usable (more $)
Indexing enough content to make your service useful (mucho time to be spending above mucho $).
The barriers of entry into the search engine market - at least today - would be *huge*.