Читать книгу Understanding Infrastructure Edge Computing - Alex Marcham - Страница 25

The key trend which the three acts of the internet highlights is the increasing growth of network regionalisation that has occurred over the preceding decades in response to the need to support new use cases, reduce the opportunities for network congestion across the internet, and provide a measurable increase in performance to end users. From a network perspective, which is especially crucial when we are talking about the internet which is itself a global network of networks, generally the shortest path between the source and destination of data in transit is preferable for reasons of both optimal performance and lowest cost, all other characteristics being equal across the network.

This regionalisation of internet infrastructure where key pieces of the network and the data centre move outwards from centralised locations to be deployed on a distributed and regional level is not an accident. As the number of users and their individual usage of the network increased, it became urgent to minimise the length of the network path between the source and destination of traffic.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), first established in 1969 [4], was the precursor to the modern internet. Although other projects existed across the world to develop technologies and standards around such transformative technologies as decentralised networks, packet switching, and resilient routing of data in transit to provide a network with the ability to withstand an attack on its infrastructure, the ARPANET was by far the most influential example.

Although considered to be a leading example of a decentralised network at its inception and during the 1970s and 1980s, by the 1990s the level of centralisation in the architecture of the ARPANET was being strained under the emergence of a large number of new internet users and applications. More regionalisation of internet infrastructure was required to address these challenges, and perhaps the most influential method of achieving this was positioning static content in caches which are placed strategically throughout the network, creating a shorter path between traffic source and destination.