At 08:52 AM 12/09/2002 -0600, Harmon Seaver wrote:
Anyone know anything about Akamai (www.akamai.com, also
akamaitechnologies.com)? I was getting about a zillion hits on my web server
from them this morning. They seem to offer services to gov't agencies according
to their website.
Akamai's been introducing new business models lately, so perhaps there's something else going on, but Akamai's basic business model is that they've got about 10,000 caching servers spread around the net and they sell caching service to web content providers.
The basic trick is that the content provider replaces their regular web pages with pages on Akamai servers, and Akamai uses various DNS and routing tricks to point you to the nearest Akamai server, so instead of getting a picture from CNN.com's server in Atlanta on their ISP, you're getting it from an Akamai server near you that's either on your ISP or one of their upstreams. This means that there's typically 30-60ms less propagation delay, depending on where you and the content provider are, plus the server capacity scales very well, so instead of CNN.com needing a huge server which gets overloaded when there's an interesting event, Akamai has 10,000 smaller servers which are sharing loads between their customers, who probably aren't all bursting at once. There are a lot of variations on this - the content provider can cache their front page, or just cache the pictures and articles, and methods for handling dynamic content and banner ads vary. There are also competing providers, including (insert disclaimers here) AT&T, Speedera, and whatever's left of Digital Island. They've got different balances between how many servers they have, how big they are, and how they find the closest one, plus what continents they're on. Some of the companies also provide servers for corporate intranets as well as the public internet. The original pricing models were pretty simple - either you pay by the peak data rate, or you pay by the total gigabytes delivered (which is more typical for software distribution such as anti-virus updates.) None of this explains why they're hitting *your* web site. Perhaps you've been mentioned in a news story on CNN.com and their caching servers are sucking in your content? Perhaps they're doing some kind of search engine, either for their own use or OEMed to a better-known search engine company? The only government stuff I saw on their website was that they've sold some service to the USGS (distributing earthquake maps, which have a really immense demand right after a quake and a low demand otherwise) and that they've got a GSA Schedule contract, so government web sites can use their caching and consultants. There's some hype about continuity of e-government after disasters and cyberterrrrrorista DDOS attacks, but that's just saying that if your agency hosts with them instead of doing it yourselves, it's much more resilient to single-point failures, plus a DDOS attack by 10,000 zombies causes a lot less damage to a system of 10,000 servers than to a single server.
