7. PLATFORM COMPONENTS Now that we have seen some of the different ways in which the Akamai platform enables the deployment and delivery of highly scalable web applications, we can take a closer look at the system components we first introduced in Section 4.2. We have already examined one of the components, the transport system, at some depth across the different types of delivery networks. We now take a closer look at the other system components. The accompanying Figure 5 provides an architectural overview of the major components we will be discussing, although this list is by no means exhaustive. 9 Similar to SSI (Server Side Includes, Akamai ESI provides a scripting language that can be executed by Akamai servers, enabling the dynamic assembly of pages at the edge. For more information, see http://www.akamai.com/html/support/esi.html
