Akamai Network

I was asked to explain how the Akamai's Content Delivery Network (CDN) operate. Here is what I have jotted down :

"Akamai is the biggest CDN in the world which builds upon distributed computing platforms. As of today, the network is comprised of more than 60,000 high performance servers to store contents and applications and these servers are scattered over 70 countries. Customers in Hong Kong are Cathay Pacific and Apple Computer etc. Last year, when the HKSAR Government hosted the fifth East Asian Games, the Games website was also linked with Akamai to better serve Internet users in the Asian region.

By subscribing to the service of Akamai, Cathay Pacific can ensure that customers worldwide can access its web contents with improved speed and performance which can not be achieved by placing an array of servers in Hong Kong. In operation, the online contents and applications of Cathay Pacific’s web server will be replicated in real-time to Akamai’s servers. When users type in the domain www.cathaypacific.com, this URL is just an alias of a sub-domain name assigned to Cathay Pacific by Akamai (cdn.cathaypacific.com.edgekey.net) which then points to a number of IP addresses."

The above note should be quite easily understood by average Internet users as well as laymen.