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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
Wow, those are strong words. Real hard news here. News for Trolls maybe.
Mike Bouma
MCSE, MCSDT, Microsoft Office Expert, Well Respected VB Scripting Genius
Mike Bouma
MCSE, MCSDT, Microsoft Office Guru, Well Respected VB Scripting Genius
According to this Google already outsources their DNS load balancing to Akamai.
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
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?
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.
:(){
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.
Akamai Technologies lost co-founder and CTO Daniel C. Lewin on American Airlines Flight 11.
0 55 1
http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/146
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
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.
Lets hope we don't Slashdot google. Anyone have a mirror?
Vote for new mod!!! Score:-2,Imbecile
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.
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!
Fall of 1999 - Akamai is at $150 per share shortly after IPO.
Jan 2000 - Akamai is at $325 per share.
Now the interesting bit. If someone were to have $650 laying around and bought 2 shares of Akamai in January of 2000, they would have about $28 left now.
If I had, instead, in January of 2000 bought 59 12 packs of rolling rock beer for $11 each w/deposit (which I assure you was around the going rate back then) in a bottle-deposit state, I could have enjoyed all of that beer and I'd have $36.40 if I turned the bottles back in.
Moral: drink more beer, speculate on the stock market lessvisit the internet's oldest currently operating people webcam: www.mitwebcam.com
Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk????
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
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 think that simon and garfinkle should stick to music.
NJ Local Music Scene
Or, you could actually read the article, wherein lies this quote:
Akamai's cofounder and chief technology officer Danny Lewin was aboard American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11 and was killed when the plane was flown into the World Trade Center.
You probably shouldn't click this.
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
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's other article titled "Parsly, Sayge, Rosemari and Time"
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.
"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.
I understand that we are not allowed to imagine beowulf clusters of these.
pity
" I mean, where else is there to turn for something as strong as Akamai for a bursting-load application?"
This is a Viagra troll, isn't it?
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
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
...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?
Akamai co-founder and chief technology officer Daniel Lewin died in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. He was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 11 when it crashed into the World Trade Center north tower.
Think that had any negative effect on Akamai's fortune?
Hmmm.
# ping www.google.com
PING www.google.akadns.net (216.239.51.104): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 216.239.51.104: icmp_seq=0 ttl=239 time=289.6 ms
64 bytes from 216.239.51.104: icmp_seq=1 ttl=239 time=251.1 ms
64 bytes from 216.239.51.104: icmp_seq=2 ttl=239 time=278.4 ms
64 bytes from 216.239.51.104: icmp_seq=3 ttl=239 time=298.3 ms
64 bytes from 216.239.51.104: icmp_seq=4 ttl=239 time=256.9 ms
...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.
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.
For all the sites that have been slashdotted into oblivion, it would neat to have Akamai cache the target site and have Slashdot link via Akamai.
... or maybe it's a money issue. I dunno. Anyone able to confirm this?
Maybe I'm talkin' out of my arse and this isn't possible. It sounds plausible to me
m.mmm..myyy
When did Simon & Garfunkel become interesting in distributed computing?
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
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.
From the last time I posted:
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.
This isn't a great recomendation given the recent news about windows update struggling to remain available.
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).