Akamai Technologies, Inc.

Akamal Technologies, Inc.

Martin T Flack

Stephen L Ludin

Moritz M Steiner

Utkarsh Goel

Jozef Hatala

Michael A Bishop

Ketan Bhardwaj

Mark C Holland

David H Kaufman

Eric L Kobrin

Moritz Steiner

It is often important that a server's responses to a set of client requests are coherent with one another, but if the client's requests are spread over time, that may not occur. In accordance with the teaching of this patent document, a client is able to communicate with a server to achieve coherency. A client can send a request (e.g., an HTTP request for a given resource) with a data preservation directive. The data preservation directive causes the server to initiate a server-side process to preserve the state of underlying server-side data upon which the response relies (or will rely). Also, a client can send a request with an attribute requesting the response be coherent with respect to some date-time or other reference point. This attribute thus asks the server to ensure coherency in the response to the client.

Ensuring coherency across responses when handling a series of client requests

A multi-tenant service platform provides network services, such as content delivery, edge compute, and/or media streaming, on behalf of, or directly for, a given tenant. The service platform offers a policy layer enabling each tenant to specify levels of acceptable performance degradation that the platform may incur so that the platform can use electricity with desirable characteristics to service client requests associated with that tenant. Service nodes in the platform (e.g., edge servers) enforce the policy layer at the time of a service request. Preferably, the 'quality' of the electricity is a measurement of source of the energy, e.g., whether it is sourced from high-carbon fossil fuels (low-quality) or low-carbon renewables (high-quality). If the desired quality of electricity cannot be achieved, the node can resort to using less electricity to handle the request, which is achieved in a variety of ways.

Service platform with configurable electricity usage characteristics

Among other things, this document describes systems, devices, and methods for improving the delivery and performance of web pages authored to produce virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) experiences. In some embodiments, such web pages are analyzed. This analysis may be initiated at the request of a content server that receives a client request for the HTML. The analysis may involve, asynchronous to the client request, loading the page into a non-user-facing browser environment and allowing the VR or AR scene to execute, even including executing animation routines for a predetermined period of time. Certain characteristics of the scene and of objects are thereby captured. Based on this information, an object list ordered by loading priority is prepared. Consulting this information in response to subsequent requests for the page, a content server can implement server push, early hints and/or other delivery enhancements.

Systems and methods for content delivery acceleration of virtual reality and augmented reality web pages

A server in a content delivery network (CDN) can examine API traffic and extract therefrom content that can be optimized before it is served to a client. The server can apply content location instructions to a given API message to find such content therein. Upon finding an instance of such content, the server can verify the identity of the content by applying a set of content verification instructions. If verification succeeds, the server can retrieve an optimized version of the identified content and swap it into the API message for the original version. If an optimized version is not available, the server can initiate an optimization process so that next time the optimized version will be available. In some embodiments, an analysis service can assist by observing traffic from an API endpoint over time, detecting the format of API messages and producing the content location and verification instructions.

Detection and optimization of content in the payloads of API messages

This document relates to a CDN balancing mitigation system. An implementing CDN can deploy systems and techniques to monitor the domains of content provider customers with an active DNS scanner and detect which are using other CDNs on the same domain. This information can be used as an input signal for identifying and implementing adjustments to CDN configuration. Both automated and semi-automated adjustments are possible. The system can issue configuration adjustments or recommendations to the implementing CDN's servers or to its personnel. These might include 'above-SLA' treatments intended to divert traffic to the implementing CDN. The effectiveness can be measured with the multi-CDN balance subsequently observed. The scanning and adjustment workflow can be permanent, temporary, or cycled. Treatments may include a variety of things, such as more cache storage, routing to less loaded servers, and so forth.

CDN configuration tuning for traffic share

CDN configuration tuning based on domain scan analysis

Cooperative Multipath (referred to herein as 'CM') significantly improves upon the current state of the art for multipath HTTP and MP-TCP. In CM, a client application will discover and/or connect to N endpoints, over N different paths. Preferably these different paths go through different networks. Hence, each path may provide a unique communication channel, potentially with unique characteristics. A typical (but not limiting) case would be N=2, with the client application connecting over, for example, cellular interface to a first endpoint, and over WiFi to a second endpoint. Wireline interfaces may also be used.

Cooperative multipath

Among other things, this document describes systems, devices, and methods for using TLS session resumption tickets to store and manage information about objects that a server or a set of servers has previously delivered to a client and therefore that the client is likely to have in client-side cache. When communicated to a server later, this information can be used to drive server decisions about whether to push an object to a client, e.g., using an HTTP/2 server push function or the like, or whether to send an early hint to the client about anobject.

Client side cache visibility with TLS session tickets

Enable a CDN server to potentially go forward to any of multiple candidate servers (or other infrastructure) to retrieve a client-requested object, based on periodic testing of such candidate servers or infrastructure for cache hits and network latency (among other things), and scoring thereof. Such candidate servers or infrastructure represent alternative places to get the object. Importantly, a candidate may be a server or infrastructure owned and/or operated by another CDN, including a CDN industry competitor, and may be discovered in a preliminary process that involves detection of multi-CDN arrangements on the Internet where the foregoing approach may be viable.

Server utilizing multiple object retrieval candidates

Among other things, this document describes systems, devices, and methods for improving the delivery of resources embedded on a web page. In one embodiment, a content delivery network analyzes markup language documents that clients have requested to embedded resources, such as linked references to images, scripts, fonts, cascading style sheets, or other types of content. This analysis may be conducted on the content server and/or asynchronously, in a dedicated analytical environment, to produce delivery instructions. Where embedded resources have hostnames for which the content delivery network is authoritative, and where certain conditions are met, servers can be instructed to push additional certificates for such hostnames over the primary connection. When embedded resources have hostnames for which the platform is not authoritative, and where certain conditions are met, servers can be instructed to pre-fetch and push such resources with a signature from the authoritative origin.

Content delivery network (CDN) providing accelerated delivery of embedded resources from CDN and third party domains

Described herein are&#x2014;among other things&#x2014;systems, methods, and apparatus for accelerating and increasing the reliability of content delivery by serving objects redundantly over multiple paths from multiple servers. In preferred embodiments, the decision to use such multipath delivery is made on the server side. A content server can modify or generate a given web page so as to invoke multipath, e.g., by injecting markup language directives and/or script instructions that will cause the client device to make multiple requests for a given object on the page. Preferably the multiple requests are made to separate content servers in separate points of presence. The teachings hereof may be advantageously implemented, without limitation, in intermediary servers such as caching proxy servers and/or in origin servers.

Server initiated multipath content delivery

Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and apparatus for improving the delivery of web content that has been authored for multiple devices. In certain embodiments, an intermediary device such as a proxy server determines the characteristics of a client device requesting multi-device content, obtains and examines the multi-device content, and in view of the particular requesting client device removes portions that are irrelevant for that device. Doing so can accelerate delivery of the content by reducing payload and relieving the client device of the processing burden associated with parsing the content to make that determination itself, among other things.

Growing community of inventors

San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Martin T Flack