The following are the important points:
There are many great answers to this questions. But wanted to consolidate all the solutions that Akamai utilizes to try and solve the problems of the internet.
- Akamai’s Infrastructure - First thing to talk about is that the currently (as of today) Akamai has more than 2,00,000+ servers located in more than 100+ locations in the world which are very well connceted and in 90% cases, an akamai edge server is just a hop away from the end users. This kind of an infrastructure helps customers further maximise the benefits of the various solutions that Akamai offers.
- How user get into the most optimal Edge Server ? - When an end user makes a request to connect to a customer’s origin that is on Akamai. The Akamai Intelligent platform allocates an edge server to the end user (which in most cases is just a hop away) and is the request is for static content, the request is served right from the edge and if it is for a dynamic content, the edge contacts the origin and fetches the content for the end user.
- Caching - Akamai CDN like any other CDN focusses on caching of static content at the edge to enhance the internet performance. This also, provides customers an offload on their origin infrastructure. Customer’s can choose to further enhance their origin offload by using a solution called Tiered Distribution which is very simple words is all about adding a secondary layer of edge servers between the edge and the origin.
- SureRoute - For dynamic content delivery it is important that the fastest route is selected between the edge and the origin and there is a solution in place called SureRoute that works towards computing the fastest pat between the edge and the origin (i.e it works towards solving the BGP protocol problem).
- TCP Optimization - There are solutions to optimize the slow start TCP protocol and also, persistent connections are used for delivery to avoid latency that is introduced when multiple TCP connections are needed to be opened.
- Prefetching - There is another feature called Prefetching which works towards warming the cache while delivering a base HTML page to end users which means that it scans the embedded links in the base HTML page, makes request to the origin for those links and fetches them for the user while delivering the base page to the user without waiting for the user to make requests for those links. So, when users make requests for those objects they are sered right from the edge rather than from the origin, thus , enhancing performance.
- Last Mile Acceleration - There are features that work towards optimizing the last mile of the internet which is the link between the end user and the edge. In this, contents is compressed before delivering to end user. akamai can reduce size of pages, content by around 70–80% by adding compression. This largely speeds up the delivery.
There are few other solutions too on offer but the above listed ones should give anyone a broad understanding of Akamai CDN at a high level. Hope it helps :)
