Re: brainstorms (Re: dns based loadbalancing/failover)
Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2001 22:52:05 -0400 From: dsr@akamai.com
If heavily enough distributed, congestion should be highly localized... if present at all. Let's assume that a "basic server" can service 10 Mbps of traffic. Install servers in various points, a la Akamai... any traffic sinks here ever manage to overload your Akamai boxen? If so, how often compared to a random traffic source.
Please don't start attacking your local Akamai box to prove this, though. Brute-force is so inelegant.
!!! My intended point was that Akamaized sites are less likely to be overloaded than non-Akamaized sites. Traffic spikes from incidents such as the release of the Starr report and the bombings last month have demonstrated this. Given enough hosting points, overloading becomes rare; I used Akamai as a real-life example. Given that overloading is rare, we can focus on failover, and worry less about load-balancing. Given that we need only to focus on failover, the problem (and hopefully the solution) becomes much simpler. I'd hope that the average NANOG reader knows better than to try any "let's see how much traffic before this breaks" stupidity... Eddy --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. - EverQuick Internet Division Phone: +1 (316) 794-8922 Wichita/(Inter)national Phone: +1 (785) 865-5885 Lawrence --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 11:23:58 +0000 (GMT) From: A Trap <blacklist@brics.com> To: blacklist@brics.com Subject: Please ignore this portion of my mail signature. These last few lines are a trap for address-harvesting spambots. Do NOT send mail to <blacklist@brics.com>, or you are likely to be blocked.
On Sun, 7 Oct 2001, E.B. Dreger wrote:
Given enough hosting points, overloading becomes rare; I used Akamai as a real-life example. Given that overloading is rare, we can focus on failover, and worry less about load-balancing. Given that we need only to focus on failover, the problem (and hopefully the solution) becomes much simpler.
There are limitations. It moves the choke points around, in particular the choke points between providers (upstream, downstream, and peers). Overloading is a problem, but it is a distributed form of overloading and harder for people outside to detect. Akamai gives excellent protection from overloading as detected by services like Keynote. To really measure how well it worked, you need a measurement infrastructure as distributed as the delivery structure. During the first couple of hours, the systems appeared to need a lot of human intervention. Its unclear to me, as an outsider, what happened during those first few hours. Was it a problem with people not using the tools as well as they could, or if things needed to be re-engineered on the fly.
participants (2)
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E.B. Dreger -
Sean Donelan