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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."
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.
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.
They are in a minor supplier/customer relationship. Akamai does DNS load balancing for Google. There's something Akamai does for cheaper than Google can do themselves...
.
Akamai doesn't deal with end users ever.
Google has lots of smart people thinking about end user applications for distributed systems.
Akamai has lots of smart people thinking about business applications for distributed systems.
Akamai has a more widely distributed network
Google has a more centralized network.
They're probably of a comparable size.
Merging the networks would be brick-stupid.
Applying good ideas from each network to the other could be very advantageous.
Giving both groups of smart people a slightly different distributed system to work with might be very productive.
It'd be a good way for Google to grow it's headcount.
(Please, contradict me if I'm talking stupid. Happens all the time.)
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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.