by Lydia Leong | October 15, 2008 | Comments Off
We’ve now hit the six-month mark on Google App Engine. And it’s still in beta. Few of the significant shortcomings in making GAE production-ready for “real applications” have been addressed. In an internal Gartner discussion this past summer, I wrote: The restrictions of the GAE sandbox are such that people writing complex, commercial Web 2.0 [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: Google
by Lydia Leong | October 15, 2008 | 2 Comments
I was just thinking about the nameserver as a vantage point in the Microsoft CDN study, and I remembered that for the CDNs themselves, the nameserver is normally their point of reference to the customer. When a content provider uses a CDN, they typically use a DNS CNAME to alias a hostname to a hostname [...]
Category: Infrastructure Tags: CDN
by Lydia Leong | October 15, 2008 | Comments Off
This is the fourth and probably final post in a series examining the Microsoft CDN study. The three previous posts covered measurement, the blind spots, and availability. This post wraps up with some conclusions. The bottom line: The Microsoft study is very interesting reading, but it doesn’t provide any useful information about CDN performance in [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: AKAM, CDN, LLNW
by Lydia Leong | October 15, 2008 | Comments Off
This post is the third in a series examining the Microsoft CDN study. My first post examined what was measured, and the second post looked at the blind spots created by the vantage-point discovery method they used. This time, I want to look at the availability and maintenance claims made by the study. CDNs are [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: AKAM, CDN, LLNW
by Lydia Leong | October 15, 2008 | Comments Off
This post is the second in a series examining the Microsoft CDN study comparing Akamai and Limelight. The first post discusses measurement: what the study does and doesn’t look at. Now, I want to build on that foundation to explain what the study misses. In the meantime, Akamai has responded publicly. One of the points [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: AKAM, CDN, LLNW
by Lydia Leong | October 13, 2008 | Comments Off
Cheng Huang et.al.’s Microsoft Research and NYU collaboration on a study entitled Measuring and Evaluating Large-Scale CDNs is worth a closer look. This is the first of what I expect will be a series of posts that aims to explain what was studied and what it means. The study charts the Akamai and Limelight CDNs, [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: AKAM, CDN, LLNW
by Lydia Leong | October 3, 2008 | Comments Off
Dan Rayburn has posted his quarterly CDN pricing update. It’s always interesting reading for me, compared to what I see out of Gartner client contracts. I’m somewhat bemused that he finds 250 TB a month to be an “average” customer; the overwhelming majority of CDN customers are below the 100 TB mark, and customers are [...]
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Category: Infrastructure Tags: CDN
