Edgecomputing: extending enterprise applications to the edge of the internet

Content delivery networks have evolved beyond traditional distributed caching. With services such as Akamai's EdgeComputing it is now possible to deploy and run enterprise business Web applications on a globally distributed computing platform, to provide subsecond response time to end users anywhere in the world. Additionally, this distributed application platform provides high levels of fault-tolerance and scalability on-demand to meet virtually any need. Application resources can be provisioned dynamically in seconds to respond automatically to changes in load on a given application.In some cases, an application can be deployed completely on the global platform without any central enterprise infrastructure. Other applications can require centralizing core business logic and transactional databases at the enterprise data center while the presentation layer and some business logic and database functionality move onto the edge platform.Implementing a distributed application service on the Internet's edge requires overcoming numerous challenges, including sandboxing for security, distributed load-balancing and resource management, accounting and billing, deployment, testing, debugging, and monitoring. Our current implementation of Akamai EdgeComputing supports application programming platforms such as Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Microsoft's .NET Framework, in large part because they make it easier to address some of these challenges. In the near future we will also support environments for other application languages such as C, PHP, and Perl.