Beyond content delivery: applications to the edge

ABSTRACT

CDNs have evolved beyond caching and delivery of web objects and streams. With services such as Akamai's EdgeComputing Powered by Websphere, distributed computing on a world-wide grid is now a reality for a wide range of business applications, providing subsecond response time to all users wherever they are, unprecedented levels of fault-tolerance, and massive scalability on-demand. Application resources can be provisioned in seconds, responding in real-time to changes in load on a given application. In some cases, an application can be deployed completely on the global platform without any central infrastructure. In other cases, core database and business logic remain in the enterprise data center, while the presentation layer and some database and business logic functionality can move onto the global platform. We will describe the evolution of CDNs and the challenges faced in distributing customer applications.