EdgeComputing: The Evolution of the Data Center
Bill Weihl
CTO, Akamai Technologies
CDNs have evolved beyond caching. With services such as Akamai's EdgeComputing Powered by Websphere, distributed computing has finally come of age. It is now possible to deploy and run business applications -- not just the hunt for aliens -- on a global distributed computing platform, providing subsecond response time to all users wherever they are, unprecedented levels of fault-tolerance, and massive scalability on-demand. Application resources can be provisioned in seconds, responding in real-time to changes in load on a given application. In some cases, an application can be deployed completely on the global platform without any central infrastructure. In other cases, core database and business logic remain in the enterprise data center, while the presentation layer and some database and business logic functionality can move onto the global platform. We will describe different applications and show how part or all of each can be moved onto a distributed on-demand platform; we will also discuss the challenges involved in enabling more of the functionality to be deployed in this fashion.
William (Bill) E. Weihl is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Akamai. Initially hired in 1999 as a technical lead for Akamai's strategic technology partnerships, Weihl was soon appointed as Chief Architect for Akamai's Content Delivery Services organization. He has played a major role in the design and development of many of Akamai's services, including customized offerings for enterprise and government accounts. As Akamai's CTO, Weihl continues to build upon and articulate Akamai's technical vision and strategy for enabling customers to extend and control their e-business infrastructures across the global Akamai platform.
Prior to Akamai, Weihl was a Senior Consulting Engineer at Compaq's (formerly Digital's) Systems Research Center. He led the design and development of Digital's Continuous Profiling Infrastructure (DCPI), innovation that has led to 19 issued patents, with several others still pending.
Prior to his work at DEC SRC, Weihl was a tenured associate professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was recognized worldwide for his leadership in research on distributed and parallel computing, with notable results in transaction processing, parallel programming languages, distributed garbage collection, replication, and scheduling. He also taught innovative courses on distributed computing at MIT and around the world.
Dr. Weihl received his B.S., M.S, and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from MIT.