Akamai Technologies, Inc. is a content delivery network or CDN and cloud services provider headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. Akamai's content delivery network is one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms, responsible for serving between 15 and 30 percent of all web traffic. The company operates a network of servers around the world and rents capacity on these servers to customers who want their websites to work faster by distributing content from locations close to the user. Over the years their customers have included Apple, Facebook, Bing, Twitter and healthcare.gov. When a user navigates to the URL of an Akamai customer, their browser is redirected to one of Akamai's copies of this website, almost entirely invisible to the vast majority of its users.
The Apache HTTP Server, colloquially called Apache, is the world's most widely used web server software. Originally based on the NCSA HTTPd server, development of Apache began in early 1995 after work on the NCSA code stalled. Apache played a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web, Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. Most commonly used on a Unix-like system, the software is available for a wide variety of operating systems, besides Unix and GNU+Linux, including eComStation, Microsoft Windows, NetWare, OpenVMS, OS/2, and TPF. Released under the Apache License, Apache is free and open-source software.
