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Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

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Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#141

Post by thedevilslawyer »

052c7028e wrote: post #138

I worked on the censorship and government reporting (sending all logs) infrastructure for Akamai China CDN. I'm glad to see it get shut down. Happy to answer questions. Previous discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33678019

Thanks for the offer - would like to understand:

1. How was working with China requests and logging, differing from working with other nation states?

2. Was there full services brought up only for China specific needs? What would they take care or?

3. How would any blocks work? allowlist or denylist? Was takedown immediate, or was it working with the customer/client and getting them to take it down within SLA?

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#142

Post by donavanm »

eh_why_not wrote: post #26

> All current China CDN customers must complete the transition to our Partners’ solution by June 30, 2026... Can anyone here who works in the field shed some light on why it takes a whole 1.5 years for such a change to take effect? What's involved in a CDN transition that can't be done in, say, 6 months?

CDNs are much more than dumb http1.1 compliant content caches these days. And every CDN has a huge number of integrations and functionality. All of which have a different impleme tation and behavior for different providers. Its probably a good analog to an infrastructure (“cloud”) migration. And even harder to test, validate, and switch the actual service provider as they _are_ “the front end.”

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#143

Post by Barrin92 »

wumeow wrote: post #114
Barrin92 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and not apply anywhere near the same enforcement to the Chinese company About two years ago China imposed regulations on its own tech sector so strict that it killed the entire "ed-tech" sector overnight and wiped out a decent chunk of the country's tech market value. What other country has done this to its own companies? The US has slapped a 100% tariff on cars, bans on Chinese hardware and software in autonomous v…

> About two years ago China imposed regulations on its own tech sector so strict that it killed the entire "ed-tech" sector overnight and wiped out a decent chunk of the country's tech market value Unless you can point to a foreign company that was treated less harshly under these regulations than a Chinese one, this doesn’t disprove the parent’s point. > The US has slapped a 100% tariff on cars, bans on Chinese hard…

>Unless you can point to a foreign company that was treated less harshly

Less? Foreign companies are supposed to get privileges? My point was they're treated equally by and large. The parent should substantiate their point, how does one disprove an unsubstantiated accusation? I'm genuinely not aware of a company that, as long as they played by domestic rules, was mistreated. Tesla operates in China, they get the same subsidies Chinese EV makers get, as does every German car company.

The other user pointed to tech companies like FB, YT or Google, but they didn't leave because they were treated unfairly, they left when they didn't want to comply with Chinese law. Which is fair enough from a value standpoint or if Americans pressure the companies into it with for example Dragonfly at Google, but that doesn't mean you're treated any worse than domestic companies.

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#144

Post by jimmydoe »

052c7028e wrote: post #138

I worked on the censorship and government reporting (sending all logs) infrastructure for Akamai China CDN. I'm glad to see it get shut down. Happy to answer questions. Previous discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33678019

Thanks for the disclosure. Don’t feel too bad, those stuff you helped built may not cause much damage as you feared.

CDN used to be at the front line of blocking content and surveillance citizens, nowadays that happens mostly thru social networks.

Unlike other countries, Chinese citizens are ultra online, and mostly concentrated on two platforms Webo and Wechat. Most other online services all require authentication via either of these two, plus cellphone number. So for govt it’s very simple to block anything or see any identity, CDN hardly play any major role anymore.

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#145

Post by 052c7028e »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #141
052c7028e wrote: post #138

I worked on the censorship and government reporting (sending all logs) infrastructure for Akamai China CDN. I'm glad to see it get shut down. Happy to answer questions. Previous discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33678019

Thanks for the offer - would like to understand: 1. How was working with China requests and logging, differing from working with other nation states? 2. Was there full services brought up only for China specific needs? What would they take care or? 3. How would any blocks work? allowlist or denylist? Was takedown immediate, or was it working with the customer/client and getting them to take it down within SLA?

1. At the time it was the only nation state that had specialty infrastructure except for maybe the US.

2. There were specific infrastructure changes made for blocking and sending logs inside mainland china.

3. The CDN node would deny access to specific urls uploaded by the Chinese partner company. I don't remember the SLA. The SLA for reporting visited URLs was 15m IIRC

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#146

Post by mihaaly »

freedomben wrote: post #104
mihaaly wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds fragile and pretty exposed. (Also a complete layman here)

It's actually the opposite. I thought the same thing before working in big enterprise though so I definitely understand how you could think that. In reality everything takes 10x longer because things are done in a very thorough way and typically with significant redundancy (high availability). The code bases are typically shite and personally I'd rather eat nails than work on them, but they are reasonably well tested…

What I meant to be dependent on a single essential service that much with that much difficulty to overcome. Smells like lots of trust and hope (of things will stay as they are for long) put into the architecture. It is nice there is a workaround, and there is a will for workaround, in this situation for instance.

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#147

Post by csomar »

ghaff wrote: post #9

I see a lot of US organizations decoupling stuff from China, especially if it's fairly peripheral, such as pulling back from running events there. But there's also a lot of more fundamental second-sourcing and the like.

It is going both ways. This is less about censorship and more about having a full local and independent supply chain. The two are going to war unless one of them collapses first or the US cedes Asia to China.

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#148

Post by [deleted] »

wafflerewire wrote: post #29
eh_why_not wrote: post #26

> All current China CDN customers must complete the transition to our Partners’ solution by June 30, 2026... Can anyone here who works in the field shed some light on why it takes a whole 1.5 years for such a change to take effect? What's involved in a CDN transition that can't be done in, say, 6 months?

My enterprise sized day job is an Akamai customer. Nothing in China directly so we won't be directly impacted. As a hypothetical, if we got told that we had to switch providers to stay in a region, we'd need to rebuild pipelines, EdgeWorkers, edge caching rules, origin routing configurations and probably more I'm not aware of. Plus testing all of those changes in a non-breaking way across the entire enterprise. Along…

[deleted]

Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#149

Post by NerdSniper9001 »

flaminHotSpeedo wrote: post #72
alephnerd wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plenty of large tech companies still play in China Depending on the segment you are in within the tech industry, the Chinese subsidiary of the foreign company might be a white-labelled Chinese offering (eg. AWS China, Azure China) or entirely unique IP developed in-house by the Chinese subsidiary.

AWS and Azure in China are the literal opposite of white labeling. It's still the global product, branded under the global name, (mostly) operated by the global organizations. The affiliation with Chinese companies is borderline fine print, white labeling would be if you had "tencent cloud" which happened to behave exactly like Azure.

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Re: Akamai to shut down its CDN operations in China

#150

Post by NerdSniper9001 »

deadfoxygrandpa wrote: post #132
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s really interesting considering China is exporting fentanyl to the USA and much of the western world today.

are they exporting fentanyl to the us? do you have a source?

[dead]
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