Stephen Ludin, Chief Architect at Akamai Technologies, discussed the company’s content delivery challenges in the age of mobile, Big Data, and the Internet of Things, as well as the company’s future plans with theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier, live at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference in Santa Clara.

Ludin said that Akamai has to deal with two very different aspects of content delivery: the performance aspect of dealing with media, video, large files in general, and web delivery and small object delivery. “My goal has been on working on figuring out how to get the bar to go faster and farther when it comes to small object delivery,” he explained.

Ludin didn’t share many details on the company’s announcement scheduled for June 20th, but said that there will be an announcement involving Mobitest, “something that we’re giving back to the community to help with web page test and performance in general.”

Complexity in growth, expectations

Asked why web performance was getting more complex, Ludin explained that while bandwidth was getting bigger, so are people’s expectations. “In order to produce the experience people expect, the technology needs are so huge. We have to deliver more and deliver faster.” The variety of devices accessing web content is also a major issue. Challenges come from addressing those situations. “Technology helps deal with the ever changing Internet.”

When it comes to diversity of content delivery and the company’s two areas of interest, Ludin said that “in the end, it’s a lot of the same software and infrastructure delivering both.” For example, for video files you want to figure out how to have constant bandwidth over a period of time. With websites, there are huge burst of traffic that have to be handled instantly. “The edges of the Internet are exploding in size, congestion is getting worse,” the growth is not at pace. “Real time experience is critical,” everyone expects it these days.

There are two different schools in the content delivery space, Ludin explained. The old school way of thinking is “give us your objects, we’ll deliver them for you”.  The new school focuses on “how to get data from one place to another faster without any caching through acceleration.” IT and ops professionals have to deliver fast, rapid, real time content, and also deal with cost configurations. “Despite all dynamic content out there, there is still a huge amount of stuff that’s cacheable, that is why you have to have a cacheable solution,” not just pure acceleration.

Internet of Things presents new challenges in content delivery

Asked how the Internet of Things and the generated machine data will alter Akamai’s challenges, Ludin said that “first off, everyone of these things needs an address, we’re out of addresses. Moving to IV6 is critical to making the Internet of Things a reality. We are rushing in this directions without a net to catch us.”

There is also a pure connectivity aspect, a lot of the things are connected via mobile, thus “the networks themselves are going to get more robust, solid and reliable.”

In Akamai’s pipeline

Commenting on Akamai’s future challenges, Ludin said that scale was probably the biggest challenge, but  actually the challenges they don’t know about yet are even tougher to handle. Surprises are what makes it so interesting and fun to be in the field.

Asked to give an example of such a surprised, Ludin said he was “surprised by the explosion of TLS/SSL and people using the encrypted Internet. It was hard to do that and do it well. There’s a lot of  cost in it.” There has been a :huge growth that I personally did not expect.” The challenge is in negotiating a TLS connection, “you go back and fourth a lot”, he said, explaining the round trips involved. The solution for such connections is to either lower the number of round trips or make them shorter. Akamai adapted by making them shorter, allowing “to zip through them very fast.”