what is akamai technologies?

 

 

While tracing my network i came across this akamaitechnologies,i am getting constantly packets from this website server and then finally i googled it and came to known about this company.

 

The company was founded in 1998 by then-MIT graduate student Daniel M. Lewin, and MIT Applied Mathematics professor Tom Leighton.

Akamai transparently mirrors content—sometimes all site content including HTML, CSS, and software downloads, and sometimes just media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, and video—from customer servers. Though the domain name (but not subdomain) is the same, the IP address points to an Akamai server rather than the customer's server. The Akamai server is automatically picked depending on the type of content and the user's network location.

The benefit is that users can receive content from whichever Akamai server is close to them or has a good connection, leading to faster download times and less vulnerability to network congestion or outages.

In addition to content caching, Akamai provides services which accelerate dynamic and personalized content, J2EE-compliant applications, and streaming media to the extent that such services frame a localized perspective

 

 

 

In the diagram shown, we see an "Akamaized" website; this simply means that certain content within the website (usually media objects such as audio, graphics, animation, video) will not point to servers owned by the original website, in this case ACME, but to servers owned by Akamai. It is important to note that even though the domain name is the same, namely www.acme.com and image.acme.com, the ip address (server) that image.acme.com points to is actually owned by Akamai and not ACME.

Step 1. The client's browser requests the default web page at the ACME site. The site returns the web page index.html.

Step 2. If the html code is examined you can see that there is a link to an image hosted on the Akamai owned server image.acme.com.

Step 3. As your web browser parses the html code it pulls the image object bigpicture.jpg from image.acme.com