Akamai revs up Java, WebSphere apps

One of the worst things that can happen to your company online is sudden popularity. There you are, ticking along nicely, Web server cruising at warp speed … then your PR people announce a price cut and, WHAM! Server utilization hits 100%, your Web applications run out of resources and die, and even if you had the spare horsepower to run your Web apps your data pipes are saturated. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

So what can you do? One neat solution is the latest version of EdgeComputing from Akamai (see links below).

Akamai became famous for its EdgeSuite service that provides a distributed, global delivery system for Web content – essentially moving the point of delivery as close as possible to the client. Implemented as a fault tolerant hierarchical network, EdgeSuite provides load balancing, content storage and claims 100% uptime.

While this is a great outsourced-solution for content it didn’t address Web applications – you’d still need to host your dynamic content somewhere else. To solve that problem Akamai came up with EdgeComputing for Java service.

EdgeComputing for Java distributes Java Server Pages, Java servlets and JavaBeans across the Akamai network so that the same benefits of moving static content nearer to the client could be extended to Java-based Web applications.

And just a few days ago, Akamai announced a variation on the EdgeComputing service that could be very interesting if you run an IBM WebSphere shop – EdgeComputing Powered by WebSphere.

EdgeComputing Powered by WebSphere will include “one-button network deployment, embedded IBM database technology, and Web services caching capabilities.”

In short, Akamai has optimized EdgeComputing to make it work painlessly with WebSphere. Definitely a cool idea.