Akamai allies with server vendors

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. - Application server vendors are teaming with content-delivery network service provider Akamai Technologies to make it easier for companies to move more content and applications out of origin servers, reducing demands on in-house systems.

Earlier this month IBM announced that its WebSphere e-business software would integrate with Akamai's EdgeSuite service, which lets companies deliver not only static content but also dynamic content and applications from the network's edge.That announcement followed similar news a week earlier that BEA Systems and Akamai were aligning to provide integration between BEA's WebLogic E-Business Platform and Akamai's network of nearly 12,000 edge caching servers.

The alliances illustrate a trend toward vendors and companies placing more demands on the public infrastructure as businesses leverage the Internet for more complex applications and transactions, analysts say.

"It's about turning CDNs into application-delivery networks," says Neal Goldman, an analyst with The Yankee Group. "It's about being able to move processing outside of the central data center, [where] as sites get bigger you have scalability issues.

"And by being able to off-load more processing to a CDN, you have to pay less for infrastructure," he adds.

Both application server products interoperate with Akamai's EdgeSuite service by incorporating a new markup language called Edge Side Includes [ESI]. Developed by Akamai and Oracle, ESI is an HTML-based markup language that defines fragments of Web pages, allowing them to be assembled and updated at the network's edge. The technology was recently published as a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) note, which is an acknowledgement from the consortium that the technology was submitted and may be acted on, although there is no guarantee it will be endorsed by the W3C.

Akamai executives say the benefit of ESI is that it provides flexibility by letting companies develop Web applications once and then deciding when the application is deployed and where it should be assembled.

Taking a load off

For example, a retail Web site incorporating ESI could construct individual Web pages using ESI-defined fragments that could then be pushed out to the network's edge and assembled based on geographic location. If a user is in New York, the CDN will serve one advertisement, and if the user is in Washington, D.C. it will serve another, without having to route the request back to an origin server.

"ESI allows the edge node to do that processing, and you get to move the processing closer to the user and therefore not burden the origin server with as many mundane processing requests," Goldman says.

As companies seek to use decentralized architectures to support Web operations, the ability to move application elements between pieces of the infrastructure is critical, says Rob Batchelder, research director at Gartner.

ESI is helping vendors do that. Akamai and Oracle unveiled ESI in April, and a month later a cross-section of vendors, including BEA and IBM, announced their support and involvement in writing the proposed standard language. Oracle has integrated ESI into its 9i application server, and more vendors - including those in the content-management, commerce-management, and application-development markets - will announce integration with ESI soon, says George Kurian, an Akamai vice president.

Others getting on board

Other CDN service providers, including Digital Island and Mirror Image, are supporting ESI. Speedera plans to support ESI in the first quarter of 2002, says Gordon Smith, a Speedera vice president.

While those three vendors say ESI will be an important piece to future edge computing technology, they're also working on their own approaches.

Mirror Image, for example, in a few weeks will announce support for Web services standard languages to enable distribution and transaction processing at the edge, says Bob Hammond, a Mirror Image vice president.

IBM is scheduled to release a beta version of the ESI-enabled WebSphere software early next year. BEA expects to have ESI integrated in its next release of WebLogic, planned for the first quarter of 2002.

However, IBM and BEA customers, can take advantage of JESI, a Java-based tag library for ESI.

Contact Senior Writer Jennifer Mears

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W3C ESI overview

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