Today Amazon Web Services launched the beta version of its content delivery network service called CloudFront. As Om mentioned in September when the service was announced, this is a good move for Amazon, and something that may put the hurt on fellow CDNs such as Limelight and Akamai. Amazon will charge a usage based fee, rather than a long-term contract, bringing CDN prices even lower for smaller web players who don’t have the scale to negotiate lower prices. Here’s how it works from the release:
The service caches copies of content close to end users for low latency delivery, while also providing fast, sustained data transfer rates needed to deliver popular objects to end users at scale. CloudFront works seamlessly with Amazon S3, where users store the original versions of objects delivered through the service. Customers need only put their objects into an Amazon S3 bucket and then register that bucket with the new service using a simple API call, which then returns a domain name used to access content through the network of edge locations.
With prices ranging from 17 cents per gigabyte for the first 10 terabytes sent out a month, to 9 cents per GB for everything over 150 TB, the service seems to undercut the pricing offered by other CDNs for small to medium sized customers. It might be a good thing that Akamai’s looking at advertising.
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After losing an infringement case brought against it by fellow content delivery network Akamai, Limelight Networks is going all out to reassure its customers that the $45.5 million judgment against it was merely a flesh wound.
In a letter posted to the company’s web site (and sent around to the media), Limelight notes its $197 million in cash on hand and explains why it’s waiting to file an appeal. All fine, but the admission that it’s working on a way to operate without infringing the Akamai patent means that this flesh wound is more akin to having a leg chopped off.
“Further, we are actively exploring alternatives that would enable us to continue to provide the same level of service that we always have and eliminate any issue of infringement, if such is determined with finality by the courts. Additionally, there are many aspects of our business that were either not accused of infringing or we believe are clearly outside the scope of what was litigated.”
The very existence of the letter indicates that customers are concerned. Shares in Limelight have dropped more than 35 percent since the Feb. 29 verdict, so now might be a good time for a deep-pocketed buyer with a fearsome legal team to step in.
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Like a ballet, a patent lawsuit has dozens of carefully orchestrated steps, and today’s judgment against Limelight Networks marks the beginning of the exciting part of the show, which could drag on for years, or get cut short by a settlement. Earlier today a jury in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts found Limelight guilty of infringing four of claims in one of Akamai’s patents, and awarded the wronged content delivery network $45.5 million in damages.
Akamai also said it would seek an injunction to stop Limelight from continuing to sell infringing services. Limelight issued a release saying it was disappointed and would appeal the verdict, which means a trip to Washington’s U.S. Court of Appeals. For a program guide to how this may play out, see our previous coverage of the Verizon/Vonage patent lawsuit.
India lost half its Internet capacity on Wednesday when two strands of fiber as thick as a thumb snapped. While service is returning to normal, it may be weeks before the cables are repaired. The fact that a pair of central Internet paths are just 2 km apart should serve as a cautionary tale as to just how fragile the Internet can be.
TeleGeography, a company that tracks cable capacity, said the two cables “account for the majority of international communications capacity between Europe and the Middle East.” With both cables cut, capacity has been reduced by 75 percent to only 620 Gbps. The cables also carry a considerable amount of traffic bound for India and Pakistan.
The Internet is designed to deal with outages. Its protocols are inherently resilient and can circumvent regional outages by finding new routes, but it can take hours for routers to agree on new paths around a breakage. Even once those new paths are established, they may not be as fast. In this case, the severed links were two of the fastest in the region, and now some data has to travel via satellite or across the Pacific rim.
We contacted Sef Kloninger, senior director of service performance at Akamai, to find out just how slow links became. Kloninger told us that for a 9-hour period — from 4 a.m. GMT to 1 p.m. GMT on Jan. 30 — tests from four cities in India across regular Internet connections climbed from their usual 2 to 6 seconds’ response time to as high as 15 to 30 seconds, and that those sites were only available to Indian users 50 percent of the time.
Akamai offers a service called “web application acceleration” that makes dynamic applications more responsive than they would be across such links. Kloninger said that even Akamai’s customers were momentarily disconnected following the break, but that unlike regular Internet users the company’s optimized routing algorithms detected the problem immediately and routed around it within minutes. “We saw most of the effect of routes into India, where connectivity was quite impacted,” he said.
India-to-U.S. response time is returning to normal. But Egypt’s minister of telecommunications, Dr. Tarek Kamel, expects the fix to take up to two weeks, and inclement weather is already hampering repair crews.
The fact that these two cables — which are supposed to provide redundancy — were so close together should be cause for alarm. When companies build data centers, they go to great lengths to ensure that power supply into the data center comes from multiple directions in order to avoid interruptions. But geographic and technical constraints mean some places are particularly crowded, much like modern versions of the Suez and Panama canals. And with this concentration comes vulnerability.
The cut also serves as a reminder of our increasing reliance on global internetworking. Customer service and offshore development are the obvious victims. But the Internet is so much a part of our lives that everything from Skype calls to family wire transfers were affected.
In May, hackers showed they could bring down an entire country. Massive botnets like Storm can control millions of computers with hundreds of thousands active daily. And a couple of simple cuts can leave millions digitally stranded and bring industries to a halt. As we come to depend on the Internet for more and more, we need to take a much closer look at its weaknesses.
Update: The BBC is reporting that a third cable in the Middle East, known as Falcon, has been cut as well. The Falcon cable won’t compound the problems of the previous two breaks, as the older Sea-M-We 3 cable is the one now carrying the bulk of data that Wednesday’s break interrupted. But conspiracy theorists are sure to start speculating.
Undersea Cable Map courtesy of Telegeography.
