Articles :: System Administration :: How Does Akamai Really Work?
written by Toby Miller on April 20, 2007 April 20, 2007
Akamai works by using your location to serve content to you from the Akamai server located closest to you, right? Well, technically yes, but no not really.
Use this image as a guide as I walk you through what's really going on when you make an Akamai request.
Quite simply, Akamai has contracts with all six of the major ISP's in the United States. This contract basically allows them to intercept traffic requests for certain domain names before the request is forwarded to the web server in question. So they're not really returning cached responses from thousands of different servers based on your location. They're returning cached responses from the ISP NOC that you made your request from. So it's actually even faster than what you probably believed before.
So just to recap, if you have an Akamai contract your user requests work like this:
- User requests a web page
- ISP filters your domain requests to Akamai (the webserver that you're trying to contact is no longer being contacted directly)
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