A step in the direction of “decentralizing Akamai” — but still uses the “centralized DNS” to create an interesting distributed web caching network — is the Coral Content Distribution Network.
Mike Dierken talks about the Coral CDN by quoting Gordon Mohr quoting Michael J. Freedman’s post to the p2p-hackers list:
To take advantage of CoralCDN, a content publisher, user, or some third party posting to a high-traffic portal, simply appends .nyud.net:8090 to the hostname in a URL. For example:
http://news.google.com/ –> http://news.google.com.nyud.net:8090/
Through DNS redirection, oblivious clients with unmodified web browsers are transparently redirected to nearby Coral web caches. These caches cooperate to transfer data from nearby peers whenever possible, minimizing the load on the origin web server and possibly reducing client latency.
Mike writes: “DNS/HTTP based P2P — Wicked cool and finally a REST based scalable p2p network. I wonder how I could use that at Amazon…”
Rohit asks if this technique could help Slashdot alleviate “The Slashdot Effect.” According to the Slashdot post on Coral, apparently not.