Design for reliability. Because of the nature of our business, the goal is to attain extremely close to 100% end-to-end availability. This requires significant effort given our fundamental assumption that components will fail frequently and in unpredictable ways. We must ensure full redundancy of components (no single points of failure, build in multiple levels of fault tolerance, and use protocols such as PAXOS [26] and decentralized leader election to accommodate for the possibility of failed system components. Design for scalability. With more than 60,000 machines and growing) across the globe, all platform components must be highly scalable. At a basic level, scaling means handling more traffic, content, and customers. This also translates into handling increasingly large volumes of resulting data that must be collected and analyzed, as well as building communications, control, and mapping systems that must support an ever-increasing number of distributed machines. Limit the necessity for human management. To a very large extent, we design the system to be autonomic. This is a corollary to the philosophy that failures are commonplace and that the system must be designed to operate in spite of them. Moreover, it is necessary in order to scale, else the human operational expense becomes too high. As such, the system must be able to respond to faults, handle shifts in load and capacity, self-tune for performance, and safely deploy software and configuration updates with minimal human intervention. (To manage its plus machines, the Akamai network operation centers currently employ around 60 people, distributed to work xx)
