[AusNOG] urlscan.io

[Mark Smith]

On 16 June 2017 at 16:35, Damian Guppy <the.damo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Akamai is a caching network. DNS does not provide the sort of intelligence
> necessary to direct requests to the most appropriate server, so you will
> always just hit the server closest to you. If that server happens to have
> the content already cached then it will serve it up itself. If it doesn't
> have some or all of the content required (cache miss) the server will act as
> a proxy and fetch the content from the closest upstream server on the akamai
> network that does have the content, and then hold onto it for an amount of
> time as defined by their internal algorithms in case anyone else needs that
> content.
>
> *this is a simplified explanation of what is a complex system*

You might want to look up the the expression "Teaching grandmother to
suck eggs".

I've worked on the assumption that CDNs, given the amount of storage
that CDN nodes have (I've seen a few in person), and that ISPs have
had their own translucent web proxies in the past, have content
proactively replicated to them so that there is no latency, even for
the first request.

>
> Thanks
> --Damian
>
> On Fri, Jun 16, 2017 at 2:29 PM, Tim Raphael <raphael.timothy at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Mark,
>>
>> You’ll find that Akamai’s algorithms will retrieve the content from the
>> origin and keep it at varying stages of “warm” in their caches based on
>> demand.
>>
>> I’d be pretty unimpressed if I was a US / EU journo trying to get
>> Australian news from a webpage 500+ms RT away.
>>
>> - Tim
>>
>>
>> > On 16 Jun 2017, at 4:25 pm, Mark Smith <markzzzsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > On 16 June 2017 at 16:10, Scott Howard <scott at doc.net.au> wrote:
>> >> On Thu, Jun 15, 2017 at 10:57 PM, Mark Smith <markzzzsmith at gmail.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> I think an interesting example is www.theage.com.au. You would expect
>> >>> the main site to be hosted somewhere inside Australia, yet it is being
>> >>> hosted by Akamai somewhere in Europe.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> Want to think about that comment a little more?
>> >>
>> >
>> > Not really, didn't think much about it before.
>> >
>> > Perhaps it it is surprising that Akamai are hosting copies of content
>> > a long way away from where it is going to be popularly read. There
>> > can't be that many readers of The Age in Europe.
>> >
>> > I don't know anything about Akamai's service optons, and whether
>> > customers can choose where their content is held or provide an
>> > indication of where the content is most likely consumed.
>> >
>> > If not, it might indicate Akamai's replication strategy could be copy
>> > everything everywhere or perhaps at least one copy in each continent.
>> > Cheap enough to do in terms of storage and network bandwidth, just a
>> > bit of a surprise it isn't more optimal.
>> >
>> >> Where do you think urlscan.io is hosted?  How does Akamai work?
>> >>
>> >>  Scott
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