Last week, a group of 35 Bentley students, accompanied by Professor Ahmed traveled into Cambridge to visit Akamai’s Network Operations Command Center, and receive networking advice from Bentley alum working at Akamai. The group was led on the tour by Bentley alum, Chris Meyfarth, who explained quite a bit about Akamai’s strategy.
Put in simple terms, Akamai started their business by providing content on the internet to users quickly. Since the internet’s routing algorithm cares only about sending packets the shortest distance to the recipients, companies that serve lots of images and video are concerned that their customers might not receive the best user experience. That’s where Akamai comes in: they have servers in every neighborhood they can. In fact, Chris informed us that it is likely that 90% of the internet is within one hop of an Akamai server. When a company hosts their images with Akamai, the user who requests an image will likely get a cached version of the image stored on the server nearest them, if it has been cached before. This makes a user’s load time decrease significantly. Chris also showed us that there are other advantages to this technology, such as being able to address security threats closer to the user rather than on the networks that most IT professionals are concerned about.
The tour of the NOCC was awesome. Once you entered the glass doors, you were among a team of people maintaining operations of the nodes necessary to serve this information. The room was half glass, half displays, with workstations in the middle and tables for people to use their tablets for breakout discussions. The displays had numerous metrics along with interactive 3D displays to see data. The metrics were staggering, and it was clear to us that Akamai had a very good dashboard to understand how their network is performing.
After the tour, more Bentley Alumni joined Chris for a Q&A session following networking. It was a fantastic event, and our hosts were very gracious for offering us a tour of such an inspiring place to work.
If you like the idea of attending these events, keep an eye out on our events page to see what’s coming up.