Get your head in the cloud

When you think about cloud computing do you think about physics? You should, suggests Willie Tejada, vice president of application acceleration for Akamai Technologies Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. Because, he says, it's physics that will determine the performance of your Internet-based application.

Tejada obsesses about the milliseconds it takes to route packets from place A to place B, the speed of electrical impulses traveling a physical distance across a wire - the physics of data in motion. He worries about the hop-based border gateway protocol that can slow response time. He's annoyed by the chatty nature TCP/IP and http protocols that combined can make as many as 30 round trips to load a single Web page. And Tejada ponders the performance implications on critical business applications imposed by national governments that filter all Internet-based traffic (China, for one). Faster networks will not solve any of these problems, he contends.

The only away around these problems, in Tejada's mind, is to put the application and the data as close as possible to users. Naturally, that happens to be Akami's business. It has 30,000 servers spread around the world. For Tejada the ultimate edge server, as Akami's machines are called, will be in your neighborhood. Just like your local Starbucks. In fact, Akami, Apple and Starbucks have begun a project to put Akami edge servers in select Starbucks coffee joints to speed up iTunes response times for patrons who want to make impulse purchases of songs playing in the store.

Tejada's core argument is right. Ultimately, cloud computing's performance drawbacks will not be solved by making its pipes bigger; that is, rolling out "the last mile" of spendy fiber-optic-based broadband to everyone's home and office desktops won't eliminate the problem of protocols and physics. The only way to cut down those milliseconds, Tejada argues, is by bringing the cloud closer to the user. But even at 30,000 edge servers, we've got many more neighborhoods to reach.