Akamai - Why a Quarter of the Internet Is Faster and More Secure than the Rest?

Stephen Ludin

Akamai

Wednesday, March 19
11:00 a.m., Lecture Hall

Comprising more than 140,000 servers located in more than 2,000 networks in almost 100 countries worldwide, the Akamai platform handles over a trillion of Internet interactions daily, helping thousands of enterprises boost the performance, reliability, and security of their Internet applications. Akamai first pioneered the concept of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) more than a decade ago to help businesses overcome these technical hurdles. Since then, both the Web and the Akamai platform have evolved tremendously. Today, Akamai delivers roughly 25 percent of all Web traffic worldwide and provides a broad range of commercial services beyond content delivery, including Web and IP application acceleration, delivery of dynamic content, delivery of live and on-demand high-definition  media, high-availability storage, analytics, and authoritative DNS services.

In this talk we provide an overview of the Akamai platform. We present the case that a highly distributed network is the most effective architecture for these purposes, particularly as content becomes more interactive and more bandwidth hungry. We then take a more detailed look at the main components of the Akamai platform, with a focus on its design principles and fault tolerant architecture. Finally, we will dive into the world of security and privacy and explore how Akamai secures the communication between users and web application.