NTAC Peering Working Group

[Michael H Lambert <>]

Thanks, David.  I wasn't aware of some of these nuances.  We've hosted a node 
for I don't remember how long.  I was acting under the assumption that if 
content wasn't on our local node, it would only be served from nodes directly 
on networks to which we announce our routes.  Obviously, it's much broader 
than that, making some of our ideas for traffic engineering a bit problematic.

Michael

On 19 Sep 2012, at 19:08, David Farmer wrote:

> A few things you should know, first few are fairly well known, some further 
> down are less well known.
> 
> 1. Amakai uses DNS magic or foo to direct where your users get their Akamai 
> content.
> 
> 2. They do a very good job of finding localized nodes to service you and to 
> balance load across nodes, and to shed load from overloaded node.
> 
> 3. If you host a local node you usually tell them the prefixes they can 
> serve from your node, this can be done via BGP.  These local hosted nodes 
> generally do not have AS20940 in the AS path.
> 
> 4. Nodes with AS20940 is the as path are generally Akamai hosted nodes in 
> general data centers, but not always.
> 
> 5. If there are multiple prepends of AS20940 these routes will generally 
> not be use to service you, they mostly exist to do cache fill for that 
> node.  If you use Akamai's hosting services then you use these routes to 
> get your content to those nodes.
> 
> 6. Nodes that service you will generally only have one AS20940 in the path, 
> and be fairly local to you if possible.  Of course this is internet 
> topology close, not necessarily physically close, but in many cases it is 
> even physically close.  And as Darrell nots on days like today some nodes 
> get overload and load is pushed around to other less used nodes.
> 
> FYI, our local Akamai node usually runs about 2.5G and was doing about 5G 
> from noon to 4:00pm and has been tapering off for a couple hours now but 
> still more than double for the time of day.  The local exchange point here 
> in Minneapolis has an Akamai operated node and saw a similar spike.  Our 
> Campus wireless when from about 1G, which is fairly typical, just before 
> noon to 1.75G just after the noon hour.  Man those bit were flying through 
> the air. :)