Akamai -- The Other Huge Distributed System 240
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."
not surprising (Score:5, Informative)
I assume this is true, at least, because at some point each of these companies have hired a friend of mine.
Re:not surprising (Score:4, Funny)
But not you?
Re:not surprising (Score:5, Funny)
Re:not surprising (Score:2)
Re:not surprising (Score:5, Informative)
And they're damn right to do so. One or two of the very top people who were present there (at the USAMO) could probably easily do a few hundred times the work of your "average" MIT grad.
Re:not surprising (Score:2)
Re:not surprising (Score:2)
There are a few possible interpretations of your statement.
Strong Words! (Score:5, Funny)
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)
Sounds like you gave allot of money to MS for nothing.
Re:Strong Words! (Score:3, Funny)
"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:3, Funny)
previously, on slashdot
Re:Strong Words! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Strong Words! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Strong Words! (Score:2, Funny)
And you spent a lot of time at school for nothing
Re:Strong Words! (Score:3, Funny)
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)
No offence, but making 'clever' modifications to the Slashdot slogan is getting just a little tired out. :(
Re:Strong Words! (Score:5, Funny)
You're, uh, new here, right?
Re:Strong Words! (Score:4, Informative)
Don't Trust Technology Review (Score:3, Informative)
From the last time I posted:
Gogle uses Akamai already? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Gogle uses Akamai already? (Score:5, Informative)
Just do a dig www.google.com
Re:Gogle uses Akamai already? (Score:4, Funny)
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)
Hint: It doesn't always make sense to do everything yourself. Not everything needs to be your core competency.
Hmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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 [mitwebcam.com]
Re:FlameOut Indeed (Score:2, Informative)
If you had $650 a year and a half ago and bought akamai at @
Re:FlameOut Indeed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:FlameOut Indeed (Score:4, Funny)
Tim
September 11th, 2001 (Score:2, Interesting)
Think that had any negative effect on Akamai's fortune?
Akamai is still losing money (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Akamai is still losing money (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Akam"ai is still losing money (Score:4, Funny)
This is a Viagra troll, isn't it?
Re:Akamai is still losing money (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Akamai competitors - AT&T and Speedera. (Score:3, Informative)
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 bo
where to turn... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Akamai is still losing money (SAVVIS)?? (Score:3, Funny)
This isn't a great recomendation given the recent news about windows update struggling to remain available [netcraft.com].
google speculation (Score:4, Informative)
You don't know how To Tell The Truth! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:You don't know how To Tell The Truth! (Score:2)
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)
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?)...
Re:You don't know how To Tell The Truth! (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:You don't know how To Tell The Truth! (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:You don't know how To Tell The Truth! (Score:2)
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.
Re:You don't know how To Tell The Truth! (Score:3, Informative)
Since there's no NDA at all possible, the secrecy would likely crumble very quickly if the shares are all but very thinly traded.
Re:You don't know how To Tell The Truth! (Score:2)
They're not going to merge, they can't. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:They're not going to merge, they can't (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They're not going to merge, they can't. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Re:They're not going to merge, they can't. (Score:2)
I misread that as "please contract me"
Re:They're not going to merge, they can't. (Score:2)
Re:They're not going to merge, they can't. (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:They're not going to merge, they can't. (Score:3, Informative)
;; 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.
Re:They're not going to merge, they can't. (Score:3, Informative)
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?
A Google/Akamai merger could work imho... (Score:2)
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)
Re:Slash (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Slash (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Slash (Score:2)
Did you notice the one mistake? The angled brackets beside "more" are pointing the wrong way on the mirror site (">>" on real site is not flipped on mirror).
Cool link, though. Is that done dynamically?
Re:Slash (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry...
I'd post the standard google cache response... (Score:2)
Searching by yourself is futile... (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Searching by yourself is futile... (Score:4, Informative)
The case for Microsoft is 180-degrees in the opposite direction.
Re:Searching by yourself is futile... (Score:4, Insightful)
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*.
Re:Searching by yourself is futile... (Score:2)
Re:Searching by yourself is futile... (Score:2)
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.
Re:Searching by yourself is futile... (Score:2)
More power to Akamai! (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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)
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)
Sick of all the buying (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sick of all the buying (Score:2)
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)
The article misses the point (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:The article misses the point (Score:2)
I think you mistake the point of Akamai... (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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)
Re:The article misses the point (Score:2)
Akamai does content delivery. Per end user, Akamai probably delivers lots more bits on average than the typical surfer gets searching a few pages from Google. Remember, one of the things Google uses to be fast is that their layout is pretty light bandwidth-wise (all-text ads, you know?).
The more datacenters Akamai has, the cl
RTFA before you talk (Score:2)
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)
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)
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)
pity
Re:too bad (Score:2)
-Adam
Missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)
obvious to everybody in the room... (Score:5, Interesting)
What's obvious to me is that the metrics were taken at 2am on Christmas morning... not that they were taken a year earlier.
Re:obvious to everybody in the room... (Score:2)
ping www.google.com (Score:2, Interesting)
# 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)
Maybe I'm talkin' out of my arse and this isn't possible. It sounds plausible to me
Use Freecache (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [freecache.org]. If you run a major ISP or university IT department, Freecache could use you.
Simon and Garfunkel?? (Score:2, Funny)
If those numbers are correct.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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
Re:If those numbers are correct.... (Score:2)
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
Re:Akamai exec (Score:2, Informative)
http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/146
or you could actually read the article... (Score:3)
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.
Re:or you could actually read the article... (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, according to reports [worldnetdaily.com], he was shot. The FAA draft memo [worldnetdaily.com] says as much. However, the FAA's final draft [upi.com] omits mention of gunfire.
Tragic Irony (Score:2)
From what I heard, Akamai gained a number of media customers as a result.
Re:Akamai exec (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Akamai exec (Score:3, Informative)