Akamai - Building a Backbone for the Intelligent Edge Platform | Juniper Global Summit

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00:07 Hello, everyone.

00:08 My name is Sally Bament

00:09 and I am Vice President of Marketing

00:11 for Juniper's Cloud and Service Provider Solutions.

00:14 Joining me today,

00:16 I have the great pleasure to introduce Christian Kaufmann,

00:19 Vice President of Technology at Akamai.

00:21 Christian, welcome. Thank you for joining us today.

00:24 Really appreciate it.

00:26 Thank you, Sally.

00:27 Thanks for the invite and the pleasure is really on my side.

00:31 Thank you.

00:32 In full disclosure, Akamai and Juniper,

00:35 we have had a very strong

00:38 and long-standing partnership for quite some years.

00:41 In fact, Juniper is one of the many

00:43 global companies that benefit from Akamai's robust

00:47 and reliable cloud offering.

00:50 First of all, on behalf of everyone at Juniper,

00:52 thank you for helping us optimize

00:54 our external digital landscape.

00:56 Obviously, a big part of that is juniper.net.

00:58 Thank you for that.

00:59 Thank you. You are most welcome.

01:03 Actually, let me give the compliment back.

01:06 As you know and as we both talk about

01:08 some of the traffic flows over Juniper routers

01:11 so we have to say thank you

01:12 for your services and your boxes.

01:15 You're very welcome.

01:17 Listen, maybe we can start

01:18 and have you tell us a little bit about

01:21 Akamai and just to share scale

01:23 and scope of the network that you've built.

01:27 Sure.

01:28 Akamai is the leading cloud and edge computation platform.

01:36 I think most people know us as a traditional CDN.

01:39 We deliver content since many, many years.

01:42 Recently, we also added security

01:45 and some other products to our portfolio.

01:48 The Akamai platform is actually quite sizable.

01:51 One of our key motivations and one of our goals is to go

01:55 as close as possible to the end-user so that the performance

01:59 and the latency is as good as possible.

02:02 For that, we distribute our platform all over the world.

02:07 We are currently in 135 countries,

02:11 a little bit over 300,000 boxes at the edge.

02:14 As you can imagine, a lot of traffic coming from there.

02:18 Perfect. Thank you.

02:21 I know you've done some interesting things,

02:24 Christian, in terms of building out the backbone to support

02:27 your server environment,

02:29 particularly around your own software-defined network as well.

02:34 Maybe if you could talk a little bit more in detail on that

02:37 particularly the benefits it brings to Akamai's business as well as

02:42 obviously the customers that you serve.

02:45 Sure.

02:47 For the people who know us when we started, traditionally,

02:52 what we did is we actually put a couple of servers depending

02:55 on the need at the given location

02:57 and put them at an internet exchange or into the Eyeball Networks.

03:02 Basically, your access provider.

03:05 That is how we started our CDN business.

03:07 For the longest time, we actually didn't have a backbone.

03:10 We had a couple of servers probably a route in front of it

03:14 and then that was an island

03:16 connected to the particular Eyeball Provider.

03:19 Over time, as traffic profiles and products change,

03:23 what we have seen is that we have more and more traffic actually

03:26 between the various clusters.

03:28 They started to talk with each other.

03:30 That had to do with caching,

03:34 storage, multi-tier caching, and stuff like that.

03:37 At this point, we decided to actually build an own backbone

03:41 to connect the various islands together where there was need.

03:45 That is also where then Juniper came into the play because

03:48 we decided to base the backbone purely on Juniper boxes.

03:53 We use Juniper boxes coming from the backbone side.

03:57 We use them for the backbone.

03:58 There are hundreds of gig links all around the world

04:01 between Juniper routers.

04:04 Then, when we come traditionally more to the metro network

04:07 or inside of a data center,

04:10 then we actually started to use different technologies

04:13 depending on the use case.

04:16 The cluster in itself which is basically

04:19 a couple of routers and the service

04:23 behind, or in a big scenario actually

04:25 where we have our own Clos network

04:27 like a fabric network as we call it.

04:29 We actually run our own proprietary SDN components in it,

04:34 which exit I'll be using, how do we route traffic in between,

04:38 how do we do the traffic distribution and the load balancing,

04:41 is actually done by an in-house software.

04:45 We then also have two flavors

04:47 and that is where the desegregation comes into it.

04:50 For the fabric itself, you can either use Junos,

04:54 and this is where we use you as the software.

04:57 We have it on white-labeled boxes or in some cases,

05:00 we have our own software,

05:02 if you need a little bit less features,

05:03 probably no MPLS or no additional parts.

05:07 Then we have written our own layer two

05:10 and layer three software stack and actually use our own stuff.

05:14 This is one of the parts which we liked on Juniper so much,

05:18 and that you offer these various flavors.

05:21 You offer on one side of box with the operating system.

05:24 Then depending on the use case or just the operating system

05:28 and everything works needlessly together with our own boxes

05:32 where we also run our own software.

05:35 This scale, if you want to call it like that,

05:38 where you can actually choose and desegregate exactly

05:42 as the original idea was the hardware from the software,

05:44 depending on the use case is something

05:46 we really appreciate this Juniper.

05:49 Thank you. That's very interesting.

05:52 Suddenly, a theme that's been top of mind for many is 2020.

05:57 What a year, in terms of massive growth in traffic,

06:01 a huge demands and more than anything,

06:04 just the shifting traffic patterns that happen literally overnight.

06:08 Tell us a little bit about how Akamai

06:10 dealt with those changes in traffic patterns

06:13 and how you might think about doing things differently,

06:16 knowing what you know now about these past 12 months.

06:21 I think we have seen two different things in 2020,

06:27 and especially March was actually the big months.

06:30 Usually, whatever we have on traffic growth for a whole year,

06:35 we basically cap that all in one month.

06:37 2020 March was as much as usually

06:40 a whole year of traffic growth.

06:42 That came actually from two sources.

06:45 One source was one of our products for enterprise security.

06:51 Whatever company now needed

06:53 a secure connection back to their office

06:58 their remote worker could take

07:00 one of these products from us.

07:02 On the other side,

07:03 now a lot of people were at home

07:05 because they also couldn't go out in the evening.

07:09 What we have seen then was a massive increase

07:12 in video consumption, but also in downloads.

07:16 Some of our customers offering

07:18 downloads for PlayStation and other boxes.

07:21 If you then start downloading a 50 or 60 gig file

07:25 as a software update or the whole game,

07:28 then that drives traffic increase.

07:32 Anything that you would do differently

07:35 knowing what now about this past year, Christian?

07:40 No, probably not.

07:42 We always had one of our business models

07:46 or customers where to plan for big events.

07:50 One big event, which was supposed to come last year

07:53 was the European Championship.

07:55 We were a little bit lucky that evening

07:57 the European Championship

07:59 didn't happen for soccer in Europe,

08:02 that what we built capacity ahead

08:05 to actually deal with that event

08:08 was the incoming very handy,

08:12 for the traffic growth or the traffic explosion,

08:16 which we actually have seen.

08:18 I think the biggest changes,

08:20 the biggest lessons learned out of that,

08:23 to be honest, we're not so much from a design perspective

08:29 or from a technology perspective,

08:31 but probably more from a supply chain perspective.

08:33 If certain countries are down.

08:36 China wasn't producing and so on.

08:38 That has an implication.

08:40 Usually, most stuff is halfway just in time,

08:44 but now you have a traffic growth which is quite huge.

08:48 Then you have to basically catch up

08:50 and build all this stuff and new capacity.

08:53 If you then figure out that

08:54 the supply chain doesn't really work,

08:56 then that's certainly an issue.

09:00 One other interesting part was, usually,

09:02 we have a good outline of when we want to upgrade

09:06 and build capacity and the backbone is one example for that

09:10 because you know your traffic growth

09:12 and you have a planning for the future.

09:16 In case of last March, I think whatever we had in mind

09:19 for whatever we need as a new design

09:22 or catch up, or how many boxes

09:24 we have to build in which timeframe

09:28 accelerated quite a bit, right?

09:30 Because now we had to catch up

09:32 and actually build all the parts

09:34 which we have eaten up in one month for the remaining year.

09:39 I absolutely understand.

09:41 I totally appreciate the supply chain demands

09:44 as well in terms of as well competing with everyone else.

09:48 Based on obviously the last 12 months

09:51 and even your experience, what's next,

09:54 Christian, for Akamai what's next for the industry?

10:01 Well, I think we have two parts.

10:03 One is still ongoing growth which we have

10:07 on the traditional CDN platform.

10:10 It's actually funny because I looked

10:12 at our notes when we first talked about

10:15 today's call and repaired it.

10:18 We actually talked about the backbone

10:21 had a traffic range at the time of 40 therapists

10:24 and that was six weeks ago or so when we started to talk.

10:27 I looked it up yesterday and now we are at 64.

10:32 We added basically another 24 therapists

10:35 just on the backbone part between

10:37 our service in just six, seven weeks.

10:41 As you can see traffic growth

10:43 doesn't really slow down on our side.

10:45 That's certainly something which will keep us occupied.

10:49 The other part, what is the next big thing?

10:52 This is always the traditional and good question.

10:55 I think there're two parts coming up,

10:57 even if they're not really well-defined yet.

11:00 One is, what are the implications of 5G?

11:03 I think nobody exactly knows yet.

11:05 You'll get all these benefits

11:07 of increased throughput and speed

11:09 but what does it actually mean for CDN and cloud providers

11:12 and what will the adoption rate be?

11:15 Then you have, of course, IoT

11:17 which fits together with the 5G story.

11:21 We certainly will see more

11:23 in regards of security products in that regard

11:27 but also even more traffic moving to the edge

11:30 which is where we are traditional at home.

11:33 That makes a lot of sense.

11:35 Listen, Christian, I just want to thank you

11:38 for your perspectives, your insights,

11:40 certainly your time as well.

11:42 Always good to catch up.

11:43 Certainly, we look forward to continued partnership

11:47 and partnership momentum going forward.

11:49 Thank you.

11:50 Thank you for your time.

11:51 Thanks to you.

11:52 Much appreciated.

11:53 Thank you.

11:54 Bye.

11:55 Bye-bye.

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