IEEE Internet Computing

When we launched the Akamai system in early 1999, it initially delivered only Web objects (images and documents). It has since evolved to distribute dynamically generated pages and even applications to the network's edge, providing customers with on-demand bandwidth and computing capacity. This reduces content providers' infrastructure requirements, and lets them deploy or expand services more quickly and easily. Our current system has more than 12,000 servers in over 1,000 networks. Operating servers in many locations poses many technical challenges, including how to direct user requests to appropriate servers, how to handle failures, how to monitor and control the servers, and how to update software across the system. We describe our system and how we've managed these challenges.

The future of Internet radio became a little clearer when the U.S. Librarian of Congress cut in half the proposed royalty rate Internet broadcasters must pay to record labels and artists. Artists and record labels were unhappy at the reduction in rate, while small Webcasters predicted bankruptcy for all but the largest Internet broadcasters. Earlier, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington had rejected the findings of his own Copyright Arbitration Royalry Panel (CARP), which recommended in February specific royalty rates for Internet Webcasters to pay to copyright holders and performers. But other than the deductions, he accepted almost all the CARP recommendations. Not normally associated with policy-making, the Librarian oversees the U.S. Copyright Office. The Copyright Office became involved with setting royalty payments for Internet radio through the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Digital Performance Rights in Sound Recordings Act. The paper considers the revenge of the recording industry.

WebCUS uses XML and XSL to generate Web-based update interfaces with integrated access control mechanisms for arbitrary database schemas. WebCUS's adaptability allowed us to reduce development time and costs in building update interfaces for managing the content databases of the 2002 Vienna International Festival (VIF) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (AAS) Web sites. We examine the WebCUS architecture and describe our experiences deploying the system with the VEF and AAS sites.

Web services are extremely flexible. Most advantageously, a developer of Web services need not know who or what will use the services being provided. The paper discusses current standards for Web services, directory services and the Semantic Web. It considers how agents extend Web services in several important ways.

Any large organizations that first came online in the late 1990s are now facing the decision whether to upgrade their Web systems or to start anew. Given the speed with which new technologies are introduced in the Web environment, system deployment life cycles have shrunk significantly-but so have system life spans. After only a few years, an organization's Internet infrastructure is likely to need a major overhaul. In late 2001, the systems architecture team to which I belong took on these issues for an organization that wanted to rebuild its Web infrastructure. The existing infrastructure contained multiple single points of failure, could not scale to expected usage patterns, was built on proprietary systems, and had a high management overhead. The legacy infrastructure had grown organically over the previous five years as administrators added unplanned features and functionality, and usage had grown 100-fold since the specifications were initially developed. Because of the age and condition of the legacy systems, we decided to redesign the solution from scratch to overcome the inherent limitations. This case study describes the process our systems architecture team followed for designing and deploying the new architecture. I detail the component selection rationale, with implementation details where allowed. Ours is just one successful approach to deploying a. multisite, fully redundant Web-based system for a large organization; other reasonable and viable ways to build such a system also exist.

We describe our approach to secure authentication and authorization for extended enterprises, which combines distributed role-based access control (RBAC), a public key infrastructure (PKI), and a privilege management infrastructure (PMI). We have implemented a J2EE-based prototype system, DRBAC-EE, which shows the feasibility of our approach.

We present our XML-based Distributed Metadata Server (Dimes) - which comprises a flexible metadata model, search software, and a Web-based interface - to support multilevel metadata access, and introduce two prototype systems. Our Scientific Data and Information Super Server (SDISS), which is based on Dimes and GDS, solves accurate data-search and outdated data-link problems by integrating metadata with the data systems. On the implementation front, we combine independent components and open-source technologies into a coherent system to dramatically extend system capabilities. Obviously, our approach can be applied to other scientific communities, such as bioinformatics and space science.