Elephant in the room - Akamai

Sun Dec 8 17:15:07 UTC 2019

Yep. Real estate must be one of their largest expenses and unlike bandwidth it is not going down to price. 😃

________________________________
From: Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com>
Sent: Sunday, December 8, 2019 6:07 PM
To: Rod Beck <rod.beck at unitedcablecompany.com>
Cc: Jared Mauch <jared at puck.nether.net>; nanog at nanog.org <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: Re: Elephant in the room - Akamai

My guess (and it’s just this since I haven’t been inside Akamai for a couple of years now) is that they are culling the less effective AANPs (from Akamai’s perspective) in favor of redeploying the hardware to more effective locations and/or to eliminate the cost of supporting/refreshing said hardware.

I would guess that the traffic level required to justify the expense of maintaining an AANP (from Akamai’s perspective) probably depends on a great many factors not all of which would be obvious as viewed from the outside. I would guess that the density of AANPs and ISP interconnection in a given geography would be among the factors that would influence that number. I would also guess that the number would tend to rise over time.

Again, just external speculation on my part.

Owen

On Dec 8, 2019, at 06:39 , Rod Beck <rod.beck at unitedcablecompany.com<mailto:rod.beck at unitedcablecompany.com>> wrote:

Taking boxes out of a network does not sound like 'emergent behavior' or unintended consequences. Sounds like a policy change. Perhaps they are being redeployed for better performance or perhaps shut down to lower costs. Or may be the cost of transit for Akamai at the margin is less than the cost of peering with 50 billion peers.

Disclaimer: Not picking a fight. Better things to do.

Regards,

Roderick.

________________________________
From: Jared Mauch <jared at puck.nether.net<mailto:jared at puck.nether.net>>
Sent: Sunday, December 8, 2019 1:19 AM
To: Rod Beck <rod.beck at unitedcablecompany.com<mailto:rod.beck at unitedcablecompany.com>>
Cc: Shawn L <shawnl at up.net<mailto:shawnl at up.net>>; nanog at nanog.org<mailto:nanog at nanog.org> <nanog at nanog.org<mailto:nanog at nanog.org>>
Subject: Re: Elephant in the room - Akamai

On Dec 7, 2019, at 5:34 PM, Rod Beck <rod.beck at unitedcablecompany.com<mailto:rod.beck at unitedcablecompany.com>> wrote:
>
> Have there been any fundamental change in their network architecture that might explain pulling these caches?

Please see my email on Friday where I outlined a few of the dynamics at play.  Akamai isn’t just one thing, it’s an entire basket of products that all have their own resulting behaviors.  This is why even though you may peer with us directly you may not see 100% of the traffic from that interconnection.  (Take SSL for example, it’s often not served via the clusters in an ISP due to the security requirements we place on those racks, and this is something we treat very seriously!)

This is why I’m encouraging people to ping me off-list, because the dynamics at play for one provider don’t match across the board.  I know we have thousands of distinct sites that each have their own attributes and composition at play.

I’ve been working hard to provide value to our AANP partners as well.  I’ll try to stop responding to the list at this point but don’t hesitate to contact me here or via other means if you’re seeing something weird.  I know I resolved a problem a few days ago for someone quickly as there was a misconfiguration left around.. We all make mistakes and can all do better.

- jared

https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/20940

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