Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services

Chapter 16Overlay Networks: An Akamai Perspective

Ramesh K. Sitaraman^1,2, Mangesh Kasbekar¹, Woody Lichtenstein¹, and Manish Jain¹

¹Akamai Technologies, Inc., Boston, MA, USA

²University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

16.1 Introduction

The Internet is transforming every aspect of communication in human society by enabling a wide range of applications for business, commerce, entertainment, news, and social interaction. Modern and future distributed applications require high reliability, performance, security, and scalability, and yet need to be developed rapidly and sustainably at low operating costs. For instance, major e-commerce sites require at least “four nines” () of reliability, allowing no more than a few minutes of downtime per month. As another example, the future migration of high quality television to the Internet would require massive scalability to flawlessly transport tens of petabits per second of data to global audiences around the world.

However, the Internet was never architected to provide the stringent requirements of such modern and futuristic distributed applications. It was created as a heterogeneous network of networks, and its design enables various entities to interact with each other in a “best effort” manner. Guarantees on high performance, availability, scalability, and security are not inherently provided on the Internet in accordance with its ...