'Aqua Ion can tackle any 'situation' in a network'

BANGALORE, INDIA: Kurian John, product manager, Aqua portfolio, Akamai APJ in an interaction with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL talks about their latest product Aqua Ion. Excerpts:

CIOL: How is the content delivery space evolving in India? What are the challenges?

Kurian John: India is at an interesting juncture now as Internet space has began to take off. We have seen this pattern in the other developed markets, such as in the US probably a few years back and now it is happening in India.

Of late, a large number of e-commerce and media companies are coming into India as they see the prospects in the market.

Unlike earlier where users used too access internet with a limited number of devices, today mobile devices such as smartphones, iPads, printers are also trying to connect to internet. Moreover, several content generation companies have also come into the picture.

Today, there are multiple networks, such as 3G network, Wi-Fi 4G, unlike before when we had only the old IT network that was trying to access internet.

Also, unlike a few years back when 90 per cent of the Internet users used Internet Explorer, today you have several other choices such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc. Moreover, BYOD is here, and unlike before even financial institutions are opening up to it.

So, the dynamics have changed. We are seeing the dynamic shifts and we would like to call it a 'situation' where you have multiple devices using multiple browsers on multiple network who are access content in there, however the experience is not the same across all of them.

CIOL: So what can Aqua Ion offer to address this situation?

Kurian John: Aqua is Akamai's content acceleration portfolio, which is our core business for many of our flagship products. The core technology of Aqua Ion is from Blaze, a company acquired by us earlier this year.

Aqua Ion has many features:

Front-end Optimization: This technology is the next stage of doing acceleration, improving performance, rendering capability and user experience.

Device capturization: With this we can identify which particular device, or operating system is being used. It has the ability to do it very fast and then deliver content at a faster rate and then depending on the network speed compress the message.

Content optimization: This will focus on the back end network and take care of large servers, databases, in order to make the back end stable so that the results you get in the front end faster.

CIOL: What makes it possible to do these functions?

Kurian John: We have tweaked the JavaScript to do the optimization. The technology internally has undergone quite a few protocol and algorithm tweaks. We do optimizations on almost all the layers, but mostly in the application layer, and then on the network and protocol layers..

For example, a 3G network, which is a very larky network, is meant for transferring data packets. So there is a lot of packet drop that can happen. So we have tweaked the protocol optimization and a lot of internal factors and parameters so that it performs best in that network also.

Similarly, we have seen that when it comes to handsets they are slower compared to laptops or desktops. Processor speed, which is usually slower on handsets, RAM, memory, which is also usually smaller in handsets, and even browser cache on these devices make a huge difference in rendering a page.

We are aware of it and solve it by optimizing content, removing spaces, compressing it, and also by not sending certain content not required at that moment.

Similarly, the front end optimization technology understands the number of licenses that are being downloaded for a single page. So if it is a heave page, it optimizes it and accelerates the whole page. Each page behave differently.

So there are quite a few optimizations that can be done, such as to remove status from JavaScript. There are over 40 optimizations that can be applied.

Technology keeps changes. Ten years back also it probably took about five seconds to load a page, but which was thin in terms of content. Today also a page takes the time to load, but is richer in content.

Tomorrow, it will become richer, so the technology has to keep pace with the changes so as to provide the same user experience.

CIOL: Don't other CDNs also undertake similar practices in order to optimize or accelerate delivery?.

Kurian John: There are many optimizations that people can do. What we have done is to take these optimizations and over time improved it. Like, we have modified them so that they suit to the mobile environments etc. The most important thing we have done is we have managed it along with our capability to deliver content faster. So it is a combination of lot of optimizations. So if you take a pure optimization company, they are good at doing optimization, but you need to back it with the capabilities that we have to accelerate because we have the right and powerful infrastructure in place to do it that we have built over a period.