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Businesses The Internet

Akamai -- The Other Huge Distributed System 240

Posted by timothy from the other-other-other dept.
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."
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Akamai -- The Other Huge Distributed System More

Akamai -- The Other Huge Distributed System

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  • not surprising (Score:5, Informative)

    by strook ( 634807 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:23PM (#8933660)
    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. ;-)

  • Strong Words! (Score:5, Funny)

    by MikeBouma2 ( 773139 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:24PM (#8933664)
    and speculates that Google might even consider buying Akamai

    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

    • Re:Strong Words! (Score:5, Funny)

      by eadint ( 156250 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:29PM (#8933730) Homepage Journal
      MCSE, MCSDT, Microsoft Office Expert, Well Respected VB Scripting Genius

      Sounds like you gave allot of money to MS for nothing.

      • Re:Strong Words! (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        HAHAHA

        "MCSE, MCSDT, Microsoft Office Expert, Well Respected VB Scripting Genius"

        How can one be THAT ridiculous?

        You should probably consider adding:
        "I know how to use a FAX machine, a watch and some Xerox copiers"

        Look, no offense, but with such "skills" you should consider McDonalds or some kind of similar position, monkey.

      • Re:Strong Words! (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Sounds like you gave allot of money to MS for nothing

        And you spent a lot of time at school for nothing

    • Wow, those are strong words. Real hard news here. News for Trolls maybe.

      You didn't hear? Slashdot's fallen on some hard times, and the marketing consultants decided they needed to liven the traffic stats up a bit with a new slogan:

      Slashdot. News for trolls. Stuff that doesn't matter.

      • Re:Strong Words! (Score:2, Insightful)

        by lvdrproject ( 626577 )
        Hahahahaha... it was funny. The first seventeen-thousand times.

        No offence, but making 'clever' modifications to the Slashdot slogan is getting just a little tired out. :(

    • Re:Strong Words! (Score:5, Funny)

      by B4RSK ( 626870 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:27PM (#8934180)
      MCSE, MCSDT, Microsoft Office Expert, Well Respected VB Scripting Genius

      You're, uh, new here, right?

    • Re:Strong Words! (Score:4, Informative)

      by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @08:14PM (#8934957)
      Technology Review is the MIT Alumni magazine. Akamai was founded by MIT professors and alumni, and employs many MIT alums. Technology Review hypes Akamai... hmm, I'll leave you to do the math there.
    • As I have demonstrated previously [slashdot.org], Technology Review is not to be trusted.

      From the last time I posted:

      I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith in what Technology Review has to say. With a quick look at their

      staff [technologyreview.com] you will see where their priorities lay. They have one fact checker and 26 people involved in marketing and advertising.

      They may have once been a reputable magazine, but since Bruce Journey [technologyreview.com] took over, they are more concerned with selling magazines than quality reporting. Mr. Journey used to

  • Gogle uses Akamai already? (Score:5, Informative)

    by bartash ( 93498 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:26PM (#8933688)
    According to this [webmasterworld.com] Google already outsources their DNS load balancing to Akamai.

    • Re:Gogle uses Akamai already? (Score:5, Informative)

      by mastropiero ( 258677 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:34PM (#8933767) Journal
      According to dig, it is confirmed...

      Just do a dig www.google.com

    • Re:Gogle uses Akamai already? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:38PM (#8934273)
      According to this Google already outsources their DNS load balancing to Akamai.

      I hate outsourcing. Outsourcing is destorying our country. Why send jobs overseas when there are plenty of people here already? Saving money isn't worth the long term costs. We should boycot all companies that use outsourcing. I'm going to stop using google and start . . .

      Huh? What?

      Akamai is an American country?

      Oh, that's very different.
      Nevermind.

      • Re:Gogle uses Akamai already? (Score:4, Funny)

        by ddent ( 166525 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @08:03PM (#8934887) Homepage
        I know... people are outsouring their telecom needs to so-called "telecom companies"... they outsource their electrical needs to so-called "power companies". Next they will have someone else building their roads!

        Hint: It doesn't always make sense to do everything yourself. Not everything needs to be your core competency.

  • Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Xenographic ( 557057 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:26PM (#8933696) Journal
    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... :/

    • FlameOut Indeed (Score:5, Funny)

      by frostyboy ( 221222 ) <benoc@[ ]m.mit.edu ['alu' in gap]> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:40PM (#8933825) Homepage

      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 less

      visit the internet's oldest currently operating people webcam: www.mitwebcam.com [mitwebcam.com]

  • Akamai is still losing money (Score:5, Interesting)

    by alen ( 225700 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:27PM (#8933711)
    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?

  • google speculation (Score:4, Informative)

    by quelrods ( 521005 ) <(quel) (at) (quelrod.net)> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:27PM (#8933714) Homepage
    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.

  • You don't know how To Tell The Truth! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:28PM (#8933717)
    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.
    • 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.

      No you can't lie to your potential investors, but maybe google never intends to become public now. They have more than enough money to beat out even the best Public companies.

      Also, if they do decide for some odd reason to become a public company, nobody said they would have to lie, they could just simply not say anything that their records (that nearly nobody r

      • Re:You don't know how To Tell The Truth! (Score:5, Informative)

        by Uber Banker ( 655221 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:07PM (#8934031)
        The point is because they have an employee compensation scheme (plus lots of VC investors) that lets so many employees 'invest' in the company the SEC will treat them like a listed company. That is fact. So if they are going to be treated like a listed company and get none of the benefit why not just get listed.

        That is what the parent said. It doesn't matter that no one can invest in it... it is treated as having the entire public as potential investors by the SEC (the reason being lots of people (mainly staff by numbers) have an investment in the company).

        To suggest nearly nobody reads reports, though, is pathetic. Share options in your employer, your annual insurance and savings plan reports... If you don't look after your money I hope you don't cry to the government when someone does funny things with it (WorldCom, Putnam, who else?)...
      • but maybe google never intends to become public now. They have more than enough money to beat out even the best Public companies.

        Maybe so, but as the poster above pointed out, they may have to behave like a public company [silicon.com], and so, may go IPO if they lose the benefits of being private.

    • So, if you pull a bunch of back of the envelope numbers from multiple presentations by multiple Google folks at different times they don't add up? Yes, numbers in their SEC filings will be more exact than that. There's no scandal.

      Every Slashdot story about a Microsoft bug declares it proof of the inferiority of closed source; every Linux bug is proof of the superiority of open source. You don't see Taco being dragged off to share a cell with Martha Stewart.

      In any case, Google's product is search results whi

      • There's a big diference between reporting news about others (where you're allowed to be inaccurate or opinionated) and reporting about yourself, which you'd better be able to get the right numbers since you have access to the right numbers.

        Of course, Google can just shut up and not disclose any non-money stats, but there'd be a big problem with not qualifying their stats when they know they're being downgraded.

  • They're not going to merge, they can't. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:32PM (#8933755)
    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.

    • 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 vari

    • Re:They're not going to merge, they can't. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:50PM (#8933902) Journal
      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.)
    • Google is using Akamai's DNS service now. So they are in a customer/supplier relationship... however I doubt that's enough of a reason for them to buy Akamai.
      • According to this link [akamai.com], Google is not one of their customers.

        Where the hell are people getting this info from? When I whois google.com I see the following:

        Registrant:
        Google Inc. (DOM-258879)
        2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View CA 94043 US

        Domain Name: google.com

        Registrar Name: Alldomains.com
        Registrar Whois: whois.alldomains.com
        Registrar Homepage: http://www.alldomains.com

        Administrative Contact:
        DNS Admin (NIC-1340142) Google Inc.
        24
        • Use dig. When I run 'dig www.google.com', I see this:

          ;; ANSWER SECTION:
          www.google.com. 3600 IN CNAME www.google.akadns.net.
          www.google.akadns.net.&nb sp; 300 IN A 64.233.167.99
          www.google.akadns.net. 300 IN A 64.233.167.104

          Slashdot won't let me post the whole output due to their filters, but try it yourself.
        • Look a little deeper.

          dig www.google.com

          www.google.com. IN A

          ANSWER SECTION:
          www.google.com. 3600 IN CNAME www.google.akadns.net.
          www.google.akadns.net.&amp ;nb sp; 300 IN A 66.102.7.104
          www.google.akadns.net. 300 IN A 66.102.7.99

          AUTHORITY SECTION:
          akadns.net. 172800 IN NS a-93.akadns.net.

          etc....

          whois akadns.net

          Registrant:
          Akamai Technologies, Inc.
          8 Cambridge Center
          Cambridge, MA 02142
          US

          Domain name: AKADNS.NET

          wow, now was that so hard?

    • 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.

      If they're doing two totally different things, then there's no product overlap (and thus need to reconcile drop otherwise valuable product lines). So that's usually *good* for a merger. Particularly if the two companies sell to the same sort of customers in a reasonable number of cases. If that's true there might be some sales savings from cal

  • Slash (Score:5, Funny)

    by strike2867 ( 658030 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:33PM (#8933760)
    Lets hope we don't Slashdot google. Anyone have a mirror?
  • 10,000+ servers!!!

    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? :E

    • Re:Searching by yourself is futile... (Score:4, Informative)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:00PM (#8933983)
      Google is hardly a monopoly. There are almost no barriers to entry in their market. There is lots of healthy competition (Altavista, Yahoo, AOL, MSN). I repeat: there are almost no barriers to entry in their market.

      The case for Microsoft is 180-degrees in the opposite direction.

      • Re:Searching by yourself is futile... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by drsmithy ( 35869 ) <drsmithy&gmail,com> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @07:47PM (#8934785)
        Google is hardly a monopoly. There are almost no barriers to entry in their market.

        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*.

        • The barrier to entry is the GFS (Google File System) and the platform. Google essential built the world's largest computer. That sort of knowledge (how to scale 100,000 machines) is hard. The problem set is quite hard. Google has it's eye on more than search, that's for certain. The barrier to entry for anyone is actually quite huge.
        • being the best at something isn't the same as prohibiting them from competing.

          as a corollary, the presence of good competition is not a barrier to entry.

          microsoft bundled a browser and didn't let netscape in on the same space. that's a barrier to entry. what's google going to do, shut down the internet and only let people access google?

          *blinks*

          holy shit.
        • That's all just the cost of making a better product. That doesn't present a barrier to entry. In the economic sense, a barrier to entry is something unrelated to the product itself. For example, if a phone company owns all the phone lines in a country, there is a huge barrier to entry. If most software runs only on Windows, that's a huge barrier to entry. Thus, potential competitors are prevented from entering the market, even if they have a better product.

  • More power to Akamai! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:43PM (#8933853) Homepage Journal
    I discovered the power of Akamai last year during the "a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport3/cwc2003/default .stm">2003 Cricket World Cup. A company called and the [wisden.com] DD/NOW [now.com] tied up to webcast around 50 eight-ten hour long cricket matches live last May.

    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!

    • messed that up.... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by GillBates0 ( 664202 )
      I discovered the power of Akamai last year during the 2003 Cricket World Cup [bbc.co.uk]. A company called Wisden [wisden.com] and DD/NOW [now.com] tied up to webcast around 50 eight-ten hour long cricket matches live last May.

      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!

  • Distribution vs. Density (Score:5, Insightful)

    by -tji ( 139690 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:43PM (#8933854) Journal
    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.

  • Personally (Score:4, Funny)

    by chadamir ( 665725 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:44PM (#8933859) Homepage
    I think that simon and garfinkle should stick to music.

  • Sick of all the buying (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gnu-sucks ( 561404 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:47PM (#8933884) Journal
    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.
    • I think it's just the evolutionary way of the business world, particularly with regard to any new territory. New technology comes out, a large number of competitors enter the market, one or two end up winning and buying out the others, liquidate their assets, and then the unemployed go on to find a new tech to exploit.

      Speaking of which, I'm temping right now at Origin's offices here in Austin, cleaning out all the leftovers. Can you say free goodies!? Man, it may be a week at $10/hr, but when you count all

  • You should also check out... (Score:3, Funny)

    by halepark ( 578694 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:47PM (#8933889)
    ...Simson Garfinkel's other article titled "Parsly, Sayge, Rosemari and Time"

  • The article misses the point (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Arch_dude ( 666557 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @05:48PM (#8933893)
    Akamai's fundamental premis is flawed. The premis is that core bandwidth is scarce, so high-hit web pages should be replicated "locally." Therefore, Akamai servers are scattered all over the place.

    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.

    • Akami is also providing CPU cycles on all those servers, as in the Logitech example.

    • I think you mistake the point of Akamai... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Slump ( 92442 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:46PM (#8934323)
      ...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.

    • Re:The article misses the point (Score:5, Informative)

      by Single GNU Theory ( 8597 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:51PM (#8934361) Journal
      No, I think you've missed the point of Akamai. Akamai is in the delivery business, but bandwidth is only part of that. Akamai delivers content, and is capable of delivering CPU cycles as well. You have also forgotten about the other last mile: the content provider's Internet connection. Most people don't go buying themselves a direct-backbone connection to put up their websites- that's left to their ISP or their ISP's ISP.

      Take, for example, a website linked to in a Slashdot front-page article. The HDD cannon today seems to have been hosed pretty badly by the Slashdot Effect. First problem was that the provider's bandwidth was not nearly enough to serve what was apparently a graphics-heavy page (I don't know- I never even got to see it!). The second problem was that even if it had been a simple page, it still takes a fair amount of power to serve a large number of simultaneous requests.

      Had that web site operator used Akamai's services, the Slashdot Effect might not have been able to make the content unavailable. Instead of one last mile to the provider being clogged, the traffic is distributed among all of Akamai's "last miles". At the same time, no one server has to cope with answering all those requests in a timely manner.

      Google can get away with a few datacenters full of servers. The bandwidth to any one Google datacenter can probably be planned for and new pipes provisioned pretty readily as they grow and expand services. Akamai is there for other uses- for example, hosting video streams of immensely popular but short-shelf-lifed sporting events. If the sanctioning body for a sport invested in enough infrastructure to provide it themselves, it would be underutilized out of season. If Akamai does it, they can host video streams of the baseball World Series for MLB, then the Superbowl for the NFL, then March Madness for the NCAA, and those organizations don't have servers sitting around twiddling virtual thumbs in the off season.

      • Re:The article misses the point (Score:4, Informative)

        by afidel ( 530433 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @08:24PM (#8935020)
        Ah, but the grandparents point is that given the same number of CPU's and the same amount of agregate bandwidth the same task can be performed no matter if the servers are at the edge or the core. He asserts that core bandwidth is super cheap and so agregate bandwidth is achievable at the core. This ignores a large part of Akami's business model which is that they don't pay ISP's for edge bandwidth! I know that my ISP was happy to get an Akami cluster on their LAN because it saved them peering cost for Akami hosted high bandwidth content that their customers were viewing. Heck I don't think they even charged them for power and AC =)
    • You didn't read the Logitech case??

      The problem is NOT bandwidth. The problem is having enough servers for a single time offering-a contest. Logitech is probably going to run that contest during christmas time next year. Why should they invest a buttload of money and time in buying servers, configuring them, hiring personnel in maintaining them when they need it ONCE a year? That is gross wastage of money.

      Thats why they hire companies like Akamai.
      Stop talking out of your ass.

  • Translation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by telstar ( 236404 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:05PM (#8934014)
    "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.

  • Web consumers can only do so much at a time... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:09PM (#8934042)
    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.

  • too bad (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:13PM (#8934076)
    I understand that we are not allowed to imagine beowulf clusters of these.

    pity

  • Missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:13PM (#8934079) Homepage Journal
    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).

  • obvious to everybody in the room... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dcfix ( 65207 ) on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @06:17PM (#8934106)
    ...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.
  • 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

  • Slashdot needs Akamai (Score:3, Interesting)

    by muck1969 ( 237358 ) <{muck} {at} {flex.com}> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @07:10PM (#8934487) Homepage
    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.

    Maybe I'm talkin' out of my arse and this isn't possible. It sounds plausible to me ... or maybe it's a money issue. I dunno. Anyone able to confirm this?

  • Simon and Garfunkel?? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When did Simon & Garfunkel become interesting in distributed computing?

  • If those numbers are correct.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis@@@ubasics...com> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @08:18PM (#8934984) Homepage Journal
    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

    • Re:If those numbers are correct.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis@@@ubasics...com> on Wednesday April 21, 2004 @08:25PM (#8935024) Homepage Journal
      Unfortunately my numbers for the 1024 bit key are not correct. It would take them significantly longer than a year to break a 1024 bit key. The 512 key (12 times a day) is still pretty substantial, though - used widely in hardware crypto systems.

      See Bulletin #13 [rsasecurity.com] from RSA Labs for a decent machine-cost analysis of breaking larger keys.

      "There, I said it, can you please put the gun away now?" :-)

      -Adam
    • 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.

      Yeah, if they gave up making money for awhile...

      Wait, isn't a Google principle a former NSA brain? Dude, I take it back, it's starting to make sense to me now! Track us all with a cookie that expires in 2038, learn our IPs, save every search, and break our encryption! Damn, they're good! Too good to be gonvernm

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