Living on the Edge for a Quarter Century: An Akamai Retrospective

Speaker:
Ramesh K. Sitaraman - Distinguished University Professor, UMass Amherst
Chief Consulting Scientist, Akamai Technologies
Organizers:
Jim Kurose - Professor of College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
Matt Caesar - Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois
As Akamai and the creation of the “edge” turn 25, we look back at the key role that the edge has played in the evolution of internet services. The story of the edge starts in the late 1990s when servers were deployed worldwide to provide content delivery services for web pages and videos. The quest to move dynamic content and application logic closer to users created the first edge computing services a few years later. The growth of the edge that now spans thousands of locations has dramatically increased the scope and importance of services that critically rely on it. This has created new challenges in operating the edge at scale and securing it from sophisticated attacks. Further, as the carbon footprint of the edge grows rapidly, reimagining a sustainable “zero-carbon” edge that is powered by renewable energy poses a key direction for future research.