Slashdot Mirror
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."
It also discusses the flame-out of Akamai after its tremendous IPO.
:/
More reason to hope Google doesn't have an IPO?
Granted, I'm not convinced that an IPO would necessarily be a bad thing for Google (and I imagine that it might give a significant financial windfall for the current stockholders). Even so, I can imagine an IPO creating more trepidation that Google might, in the future, abandon its "don't be evil" policy and become a more "normal" company in that regard...
Which is probably a pretty sad commentary about what we consider to be "normal" for companies these days...
I did a quick look up of their finances and they are still losing money. I wonder how long they can keep going like this without being bought out?
10,000+ servers!!!
:E
WOW!! 6 years ago Google was an ity bity startup in someones garage.
A testimony to the American Dream or a fine example of monopoly at work? [OK there not 100%, but neither is MS]
Paranoia check? How much of that 4+ petabytes is devoted to YOU?
May the Maths Be with you!
I was amazed with the quality of the video - almost no latency (when compared to simultaneous TV broadcast) and very high resolution. Some investigation revealed that they were caching video off the local Akamai servers in the area. Akamai is underrated for sure - atleast compared to Google but they have the POWER!
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
By contrast, Google has a whole bunch of computers in each of a very few places. This completely changes the economics.
The reason Akamai's premis is flawed is simple: core bandwidth is cheap, because the core was overbuilt during the bubble and because of the incredible advances in core technologies. By contrast, the last mile is still constrained, primarily because of monopolies and politics.
The effect of this is that once your packet gets from your house to the first router, the rest of the internet is all effectively an equal cost from you.
...he repeated that figure of 1,000 queries per second--but he said that the measure was made at 2:00 a.m. on December 25, 2001. His point, obvious to everybody in the room, is that even by November 2002, Google was doing a lot more than 1,000 queries per second--just how many more, though, was anybody's guess.
What's obvious to me is that the metrics were taken at 2am on Christmas morning... not that they were taken a year earlier.
What cod piece?
Assuming those numbers are correct, and assuming they use several year old algorithms:
Google can break an RSA-512 key. 12 times a day.
It would take them 8 months to break an RSA-1024 key.
Of course this glosses over some of the technical difficulties (such as memory bandwidth, RAM, etc) but the interesting thing is that if they directed their gaze towards a problem of for even an hour, they could solve some truly monumental problems.
But, according to Slashdot, Google is good today, not evil, so we can expect them not to use their power for bad.
-Adam
Thanks to archive.org, you too can join in on the caching fun! If you want to post a web page's URL to Slashdot without having it, um, Slashdotted, you could use Freecache. If you run a major ISP or university IT department, Freecache could use you.