Have you ever wondered why Daniel Lewin’s company, Akamai Technologies, was so significant to the Internet we use today? When you think about it, the Internet was a pretty amazing invention, especially considering how carelessly it was put together back when DARPA released it for commercial use in the 1980s. In fact, no one could’ve imagined how critical the Internet would become.
And a big part of the Internet’s success is owned to the early visionaries of the Internet, who pieced together enough structure to keep the whole thing to keep from collapsing in on itself while allowing room for innovators to come up with solutions to enable devices around the world to connect and communicate.
Since then, the volume of data that travels throughout the Internet has exploded! In fact, one of the biggest challenges that arose early on was the speed at which data could be retrieved from a web server and presented to the user, who was sometimes thousands of miles away from the server.
At that time, many people proclaimed that the Internet reached its breaking point and wouldn’t be able to scale to meet the needs of the growing, web-surfing population. But fortunately, a professor named Tom Leighton and a graduate student named Daniel Lewin from Massachusetts Institute of Technology stepped in with a solution!
These two bright individuals worked together to found Akamai Technologies, which strived to solve the scalability problem plaguing the Internet. The scalability problem often resulted in slow performance and broken links. While the Internet was a small fraction of what it is today, it was already useless for a lot of people.
So how did Akamai Technologies resolve the problem? Well, they managed to develop a mathematical algorithm that allowed data to be routed dynamically so users could be served information from a closer system.
In fact, they also made it possible for content from a web server to be mirrored by multiple servers across the world, so when someone searched for information, it was found from the closest server instead of the original server. As their system was so successful, it continues to be used today – Akamai servers handle over 30% of the world’s web traffic.
To learn more about Akamai Technologies, give us a call at (831) 753-7677 or send us an email at [email protected]. Alvarez Technology Group can address any of your questions or concerns about the beloved Internet!
