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57-499: Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American company specialized in content delivery network (CDN), cybersecurity , DDoS mitigation , and cloud services . It is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts . The company was named after akamai , which means 'clever,' or more colloquially, 'cool' in Hawaiian . Co-founder Daniel M. Lewin found the term in a Hawaiian-English dictionary after

114-463: A Federated CDN offering, which is more interesting for a content provider willing to deliver its content to the aggregated audience of this federation. It is likely that in a near future, other telco CDN federations will be created. They will grow by enrollment of new telcos joining the federation and bringing network presence and their Internet subscriber bases to the existing ones. The Open Caching specification by Streaming Media Alliance defines

171-625: A backup option in case the capacity of the private network is not enough or there is a failure which leads to capacity reduction. Since the same content has to be distributed across many locations, a variety of multicasting techniques may be used to reduce bandwidth consumption. Over private networks, it has also been proposed to select multicast trees according to network load conditions to more efficiently utilize available network capacity. The rapid growth of streaming video traffic uses large capital expenditures by broadband providers in order to meet this demand and retain subscribers by delivering

228-501: A browser. The most-used browser is Google Chrome , with a 67% global market share on all devices, followed by Safari with 18%. A web browser is not the same thing as a search engine , though the two are often confused. A search engine is a website that provides links to other websites. However, to connect to a website's server and display its web pages, a user must have a web browser installed. In some technical contexts, browsers are referred to as user agents . The purpose of

285-453: A colleague's suggestion. Akamai Technologies entered the 1998 MIT $ 50K competition with a business proposition based on their research on consistent hashing , and was selected as one of the finalists. By August 1998, they had developed a working prototype, and with the help of Jonathan Seelig and Randall Kaplan , they took steps to incorporate the company. Akamai Technologies was incorporated on August 20, 1998. In late 1998 and early 1999,

342-434: A global consortium of leading Internet service providers led by Google announced their official implementation of the edns-client-subnet IETF Internet Draft , which is intended to accurately localize DNS resolution responses. The initiative involves a limited number of leading DNS service providers, such as Google Public DNS , and CDN service providers as well. With the edns-client-subnet EDNS0 option , CDNs can now utilize

399-459: A group of business professionals and scientists joined the founding team—most notably, Paul Sagan , former president of New Media for Time Inc. , and George Conrades , former chairman and chief executive officer of BBN Corp. and senior vice president of US operations for IBM . Conrades became chief executive officer of Akamai in April 1999. The company launched its commercial service in April 1999 and

456-595: A purpose-built building at 145 Broadway in December 2019. The Akamai Intelligent Platform is a distributed cloud computing platform that operates worldwide, a network of over approximately 365,000 servers in more than 135 countries. These servers reside on roughly 1,350 of the world's networks, gathering real-time information about traffic, congestion, and trouble spots. Each Akamai server is equipped with proprietary software that uses complex algorithms to process requests from nearby users. The content delivery process begins with

513-471: A section in the menu for deleting cookies. Finer-grained management of cookies usually requires a browser extension . The first web browser, called WorldWideWeb , was created in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee . He then recruited Nicola Pellow to write the Line Mode Browser , which displayed web pages on dumb terminals . The Mosaic web browser was released in April 1993, and was later credited as

570-524: A server nearer to the user allows for faster downloads and less vulnerability to network congestion . Akamai claims to provide better scalability by delivering the content over the last mile from servers close to end-users, avoiding the middle-mile bottleneck of the Internet. The Download Delivery product line includes HTTP downloads for large downloadable objects, a customizable application for consumers, and analytics tools with metrics that monitor and report on

627-464: A set of APIs that allows a Content Provider to deliver its content using several CDNs in a consistent way, seeing each CDN provider the same way through these APIs. Traditionally, CDNs have used the IP of the client's recursive DNS resolver to geo-locate the client. While this is a sound approach in many situations, this leads to poor client performance if the client uses a non-local recursive DNS resolver that

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684-482: A single-point user interface. These papers in scientific conferences and journals describe Akamai's technology in greater detail: Content delivery network CDNs are a layer in the internet ecosystem. Content owners such as media companies and e-commerce vendors pay CDN operators to deliver their content to their end users. In turn, a CDN pays Internet service providers (ISPs), carriers, and network operators for hosting its servers in their data centers. CDN

741-441: A sufficiently good quality of experience . To address this, telecommunications service providers have begun to launch their own content delivery networks as a means to lessen the demands on the network backbone and reduce infrastructure investments. Because they own the networks over which video content is transmitted, telco CDNs have advantages over traditional CDNs. They own the last mile and can deliver content closer to

798-528: A user submitting a request to a browser . When a user enters a URL, a DNS request is triggered to Akamai's authoritative DNS and an IP address is retrieved. With the IP address, the browser can then directly contact the Akamai edge server for subsequent requests. In a content delivery network (CDN) structure, the domain name of the URL is translated by the mapping system into the IP address of an edge server to serve

855-477: A variety of methods of content delivery including, but not limited to, manual asset copying, active web caches, and global hardware load balancers. Several protocol suites are designed to provide access to a wide variety of content services distributed throughout a content network. The Internet Content Adaptation Protocol (ICAP) was developed in the late 1990s to provide an open standard for connecting application servers. A more recently defined and robust solution

912-530: A web browser is to fetch content and display it on the user's device. This process begins when the user inputs a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), such as https://en.wikipedia.org/ , into the browser. Virtually all URLs on the Web start with either http: or https: which means they are retrieved with the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). For secure mode (HTTPS), the connection between

969-419: A web switch, content switch, or multilayer switch) to share traffic among a number of servers or web caches. Here the switch is assigned a single virtual IP address . Traffic arriving at the switch is then directed to one of the real web servers attached to the switch. This has the advantage of balancing load, increasing total capacity, improving scalability, and providing increased reliability by redistributing

1026-555: A website using a CDN may violate the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). For example, in 2021 a German court forbade the use of a CDN on a university website, because this caused the transmission of the user's IP address to the CDN, which violated the GDPR. CDNs serving JavaScript have also been targeted as a way to inject malicious content into pages using them. Subresource Integrity mechanism

1083-790: Is an umbrella term spanning different types of content delivery services: video streaming , software downloads, web and mobile content acceleration, licensed/managed CDN, transparent caching, and services to measure CDN performance, load balancing , Multi CDN switching and analytics and cloud intelligence. CDN vendors may cross over into other industries like security, DDoS protection and web application firewalls (WAF), and WAN optimization. Notable content delivery service providers include Akamai Technologies , Edgio , Cloudflare , Amazon CloudFront , Fastly , and Google Cloud CDN . CDN nodes are usually deployed in multiple locations, often over multiple Internet backbones . Benefits include reducing bandwidth costs, improving page load times, and increasing

1140-460: Is based on Mozilla 's code. Both of these codebases are open-source, so a number of small niche browsers are also made from them. The most popular browsers share many features in common. They automatically log users' browsing history , unless the users turn off their browsing history or use the non-logging private mode . They also allow users to set bookmarks , customize the browser with extensions , and can manage user passwords . Some provide

1197-532: Is far away. For instance, a CDN may route requests from a client in India to its edge server in Singapore, if that client uses a public DNS resolver in Singapore, causing poor performance for that client. Indeed, a recent study showed that in many countries where public DNS resolvers are in popular use, the median distance between the clients and their recursive DNS resolvers can be as high as a thousand miles. In August 2011,

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1254-813: Is one of the major advantages of using P2P networks because it makes the setup and running costs very small for the original content distributor. If content owners are not satisfied with the options or costs of a commercial CDN service, they can create their own CDN. This is called a private CDN. A private CDN consists of PoPs (points of presence) that are only serving content for their owner. These PoPs can be caching servers, reverse proxies or application delivery controllers. It can be as simple as two caching servers, or large enough to serve petabytes of content. Large content distribution networks may even build and set up their own private network to distribute copies of content across cache locations. Such private networks are usually used in conjunction with public networks as

1311-566: Is provided by the Open Pluggable Edge Services (OPES) protocol. This architecture defines OPES service applications that can reside on the OPES processor itself or be executed remotely on a Callout Server. Edge Side Includes or ESI is a small markup language for edge-level dynamic web content assembly. It is fairly common for websites to have generated content. It could be because of changing content like catalogs or forums, or because of

1368-440: Is specialized, simplified, and optimized to only forward data packets. Content Delivery Networks augment the end-to-end transport network by distributing on it a variety of intelligent applications employing techniques designed to optimize content delivery. The resulting tightly integrated overlay uses web caching, server-load balancing, request routing, and content services. Web caches store popular content on servers that have

1425-408: The most popular browser. Microsoft debuted Internet Explorer in 1995, leading to a browser war with Netscape. Within a few years, Microsoft gained a dominant position in the browser market for two reasons: it bundled Internet Explorer with its popular Windows operating system and did so as freeware with no restrictions on usage. The market share of Internet Explorer peaked at over 95% in

1482-464: The <picture> element) as Image CDN s. The expression referred to the ability of a web architecture to serve multiple versions of the same image through HTTP, depending on the properties of the browser requesting it, as determined by either the browser or the server-side logic. The purpose of Image CDNs was, in Google's vision, to serve high-quality images (or, better, images perceived as high-quality by

1539-403: The IP address of the requesting client's subnet when resolving DNS requests. This approach, called end-user mapping, has been adopted by CDNs and it has been shown to drastically reduce the round-trip latencies and improve performance for clients who use public DNS or other non-local resolvers. However, the use of EDNS0 also has drawbacks as it decreases the effectiveness of caching resolutions at

1596-513: The basis for many other browsers, including Microsoft Edge , currently in third place with about a 5% share, as well as Samsung Internet and Opera in fifth and sixth places respectively with over 2% market share each. The other two browsers in the top four are made from different codebases . Safari , based on Apple 's WebKit code, is the second most popular web browser and is dominant on Apple devices, resulting in an 18% global share. Firefox , in fourth place, with about 3% market share,

1653-494: The browser and web server is encrypted , providing a secure and private data transfer. Web pages usually contain hyperlinks to other pages and resources. Each link contains a URL, and when it is clicked or tapped , the browser navigates to the new resource. Most browsers use an internal cache of web page resources to improve loading times for subsequent visits to the same page. The cache can store many items, such as large images, so they do not need to be downloaded from

1710-413: The client, or to the one with the most capacity. A variety of algorithms are used to route the request. These include Global Server Load Balancing, DNS-based request routing, Dynamic metafile generation, HTML rewriting, and anycasting . Proximity—choosing the closest service node—is estimated using a variety of techniques including reactive probing, proactive probing, and connection monitoring. CDNs use

1767-409: The content to the user. Akamai delivers web content over its Intelligent Platform by transparently mirroring elements such as HTML , CSS , software downloads, and media objects from customers' servers. The Akamai server is automatically chosen depending on the type of content and the user's network location. The servers are located in more than 200 countries and territories. Receiving content from

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1824-473: The current situation with the main software CDNs in this space: Web browser A web browser is an application for accessing websites . When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on a range of devices, including desktops , laptops , tablets , and smartphones . By 2020, an estimated 4.9 billion people had used

1881-561: The download process. In addition to using its own servers, Akamai delivers certain content from other end-users' computers, in the form of peer-to-peer networking. On October 9, 2013, Akamai announced its Open Initiative at the 2013 Akamai Edge Conference. OPEN allows customers and partners to develop and customize how they interact with the Akamai Intelligent Platform. Its key components include system and development operations integration, real-time big data integration, and

1938-646: The early 2000s. In 1998, Netscape launched what would become the Mozilla Foundation to create a new browser using the open-source software model. This work evolved into the Firefox browser, first released by Mozilla in 2004. Firefox's market share peaked at 32% in 2010. Apple released its Safari browser in 2003; it remains the dominant browser on Apple devices, though it did not become popular elsewhere. Google debuted its Chrome browser in 2008, which steadily took market share from Internet Explorer and became

1995-416: The end user at the edge of the network may have an advantage in performance or cost. Most CDN providers will provide their services over a varying, defined, set of PoPs, depending on the coverage desired, such as United States, International or Global, Asia-Pacific, etc. These sets of PoPs can be called "edges", "edge nodes", "edge servers", or "edge networks" as they would be the closest edge of CDN assets to

2052-491: The end user. CDN providers profit either from direct fees paid by content providers using their network, or profit from the user analytics and tracking data collected as their scripts are being loaded onto customers' websites inside their browser origin . As such these services are being pointed out as potential privacy intrusions for the purpose of behavioral targeting and solutions are being created to restore single-origin serving and caching of resources. In particular,

2109-469: The end-user because it can be cached deep in their networks. This deep caching minimizes the distance that video data travels over the general Internet and delivers it more quickly and reliably. Telco CDNs also have a built-in cost advantage since traditional CDNs must lease bandwidth from them and build the operator's margin into their own cost model. In addition, by operating their own content delivery infrastructure, telco operators have better control over

2166-631: The first web browser to find mainstream popularity. Its innovative graphical user interface made the World Wide Web easy to navigate and thus more accessible to the average person. This, in turn, sparked the Internet boom of the 1990s, when the Web grew at a very rapid rate. The lead developers of Mosaic then founded the Netscape corporation, which released the Mosaic-influenced Netscape Navigator in 1994. Navigator quickly became

2223-492: The global availability of content. The number of nodes and servers making up a CDN varies, depending on the architecture, some reaching thousands of nodes with tens of thousands of servers on many remote points of presence (PoPs). Others build a global network and have a small number of geographical PoPs. Requests for content are typically algorithmically directed to nodes that are optimal in some way. When optimizing for performance, locations that are best for serving content to

2280-510: The greatest demand for the content requested. These shared network appliances reduce bandwidth requirements, reduce server load, and improve the client response times for content stored in the cache. Web caches are populated based on requests from users (pull caching) or based on preloaded content disseminated from content servers (push caching). Server-load balancing uses one or more techniques including service-based (global load balancing) or hardware-based (i.e. layer 4–7 switches , also known as

2337-560: The hijackers and may have tried to stop them. Arabic news network Al-Jazeera was an Akamai customer from March 28, 2003 to April 2, 2003, when Akamai decided to end the relationship, which the network's English-language managing editor claimed was due to "political pressure". In 2005, Paul Sagan was named chief executive officer of Akamai, taking over from Conrades. Sagan worked to differentiate Akamai from its competitors by expanding its breadth of services. Under his leadership, it grew to $ 1.37 billion in revenue. In July 2007, Akamai

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2394-685: The human eye) while preserving download speed, thus contributing to a great User experience (UX). Arguably, the Image CDN term was originally a misnomer, as neither Cloudinary nor Imgix (the examples quoted by Google in the 2017 guide by Addy Osmani) were, at the time, a CDN in the classical sense of the term. Shortly afterwards, though, several companies offered solutions that allowed developers to serve different versions of their graphical assets according to several strategies. Many of these solutions were built on top of traditional CDNs, such as Akamai , CloudFront , Fastly , Edgecast and Cloudflare . At

2451-410: The load of a failed web server and providing server health checks. A content cluster or service node can be formed using a layer 4–7 switch to balance load across a number of servers or a number of web caches within the network. Request routing directs client requests to the content source best able to serve the request. This may involve directing a client request to the service node that is closest to

2508-508: The most popular browser in 2012. Chrome has remained dominant ever since. By 2015, Microsoft replaced Internet Explorer with Edge for the Windows 10 release. Since the early 2000s, browsers have greatly expanded their HTML , CSS , JavaScript , and multimedia capabilities. One reason has been to enable more sophisticated websites, such as web apps . Another factor is the significant increase of broadband connectivity in many parts of

2565-466: The personalization. This creates a problem for caching systems. To overcome this problem, a group of companies created ESI. In peer-to-peer (P2P) content-delivery networks, clients provide resources as well as use them. This means that, unlike client–server systems, the content-centric networks can actually perform better as more users begin to access the content (especially with protocols such as Bittorrent that require users to share). This property

2622-471: The provider's geographical coverage. As the virtual cache placement is based on both the content type and server or end-user geographic location, the vCDNs have a significant impact on service delivery and network congestion. In 2017, Addy Osmani of Google started referring to software solutions that could integrate naturally with the Responsive Web Design paradigm (with particular reference to

2679-564: The recursive resolvers, increases the total DNS resolution traffic, and raises a privacy concern of exposing the client's subnet. Virtualization technologies are being used to deploy virtual CDNs (vCDNs) with the goal to reduce content provider costs, and at the same time, increase elasticity and decrease service delay. With vCDNs, it is possible to avoid traditional CDN limitations, such as performance, reliability and availability since virtual caches are deployed dynamically (as virtual machines or containers) in physical servers distributed across

2736-514: The same time, other solutions that already provided an image multi-serving service joined the Image CDN definition by either offering CDN functionality natively (ImageEngine) or integrating with one of the existing CDNs (Cloudinary/Akamai, Imgix/Fastly). While providing a universally agreed-on definition of what an Image CDN is may not be possible, generally speaking, an Image CDN supports the following three components: The following table summarizes

2793-401: The server again. Cached items are usually only stored for as long as the web server stipulates in its HTTP response messages. During the course of browsing, cookies received from various websites are stored by the browser. Some of them contain login credentials or site preferences. However, others are used for tracking user behavior over long periods of time, so browsers typically provide

2850-479: The user may be chosen. This may be measured by choosing locations that are the fewest hops , the lowest number of network seconds away from the requesting client, or the highest availability in terms of server performance (both current and historical), to optimize delivery across local networks. When optimizing for cost, locations that are the least expensive may be chosen instead. In an optimal scenario, these two goals tend to align, as edge servers that are close to

2907-627: The utilization of their resources. In contrast, the deployment of telco-CDNs allows operators to implement their own content management operations, which enables them to have a better control over the utilization of their resources and, as such, provide better quality of service and experience to their end users. In June 2011, StreamingMedia.com reported that a group of TSPs had founded an Operator Carrier Exchange (OCX) to interconnect their networks and compete more directly against large traditional CDNs like Akamai and Limelight Networks , which have extensive PoPs worldwide. This way, telcos are building

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2964-418: The utilization of their resources. Content management operations performed by CDNs are usually applied without (or with very limited) information about the network (e.g., topology, utilization etc.) of the telco-operators with which they interact or have business relationships. These pose a number of challenges for the telco-operators who have a limited sphere of action in face of the impact of these operations on

3021-405: The world, enabling people to access data-intensive content, such as streaming HD video on YouTube , that was not possible during the era of dial-up modems . Google Chrome has been the dominant browser since the mid-2010s and currently has a 67% global market share on all devices. The vast majority of its source code comes from Google's open-source Chromium project; this code is also

3078-543: Was added to the S&;P 500 Index. In 2013, co-founder Tom Leighton was elected chief executive officer, replacing Sagan. In 2013, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged a former executive at Akamai Technologies for illegally tipping non-public information about the company's financial predicament as part of the insider trading scheme operated by now-imprisoned Galleon Management hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam. In 2014 it

3135-399: Was created in response to ensure that the page loads a script whose content is known and constrained to a hash referenced by the website author. The Internet was designed according to the end-to-end principle . This principle keeps the core network relatively simple and moves the intelligence as much as possible to the network end-points: the hosts and clients. As a result, the core network

3192-641: Was listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market from October 29, 1999. On July 1, 2001, Akamai was added to the Russell 3000 Index and Russell 2000 Index. On September 11, 2001, co-founder Daniel M. Lewin died in the September 11 attacks at the age of 31 when he was stabbed by one of the hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11 , the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center . He was seated closest to

3249-940: Was reported that the National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation used Facebook 's Akamai CDN to collect information on Facebook users. On February 9, 2021, Akamai announced it would reorganize into two internal groups, Security Technology and Edge Technology. It also re-established the role of chief technology officer, and named Robert Blumofe to that role. Long-time chief security officer (CSO) Andy Ellis announced he would leave in March 2021. Akamai's headquarters are in Kendall Square . It started in Technology Square and later expanded to multiple buildings in Cambridge Center . It consolidated its offices in

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