TechNayak

There is a new jargon in town and people are clamouring to know what it means. CDN or content delivery networks. Some of the biggest sites, like Yahoo Mail and iTunes store are built on this technology and from the first look, the technology looks really promising. Akamai Technologies is one of the biggest Content Delivery networks today with a clientele of the Industry’s best, viz the two biggies above( those are the ones I know of).

Content Delivery network is a platform for delivery of whatever content you wish to send or share. Say you are a company which does p2p work, you have the application, but you dont have the neccesary infrastructure to make it out in the mainstream. Even if you manage to rent a server and start off, scalability becomes a big issue, in comes CDN’s to save the day. For certain sum of money the CDN takes care of the  delivery, scalability, reliability needs of your application. All you have to do is use the underlying architecture and do some changes to the way your content is delivered.

Akamai does delivery of your streaming audio/video, downloads, FTP and ofcourse http. Akamai does this using their Edge Platform, apparently one of the largest distributed network in the with almost 20,000 servers in over 71 countries. The content is mirrored across these servers and when a user requests for content, based on certian algorithmic computation the content is delivered from the most nearest non clogged server. It even takes care of load distribution and clog times. Apart from all this, they even provide analytics for the delivered content.

The future is really bright for these applications and people really don’t want to worry about hardware nitty gritty’s and concentrate more on the application. Grid hosting, S3 and now Akamai are just stepping stones to achieve an extremely scalable, reliable and a fast application.