6. HIGH-PERFORMANCE APPLICATION DELIVERY NETWORKS As websites have become increasingly dynamic, the ability to improve the performance of applications and other non-cacheable content has become critical. We take two complementary approaches to this, both based on first connecting end users to nearby Akamai servers. The first approach is to speedup long- haul Internet communications by using the Akamai platform as a high-performance overlay network [5][35]. The second approach pushes application logic from the origin server out to the edge of the Internet. These approaches work in concert to improve application performance, reliability, and scalability. Some customer use cases are presented in Section 9.2. We now look at each in more detail.
