Re: That routing/redirection thing: mapping (?)

[Mark Nottingham <mnot@akamai.com>]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 10:21:03PM -0500, Markus Hofmann wrote:
> Every DIRECTION system consists of two parts:
>   (a) the mapper (i.e. finding the best surrogate), and
>   (b) the actual redirection mechanisms, i.e. the "client
>       front end" that makes use of the mapper result and
>       makes sure that the client request ends up at the
>       correct surrogate.
> We can use the same mapper module with different "front ends", for
> example use the mapper module with a DNS front end or with URL
> rewriting.

Yes. The redirection mechanism could be DNS (possibly through multiple
CNAMEs, DNS hierarchy, etc.), HTTP redirection, BGP funniness, etc. What
they base their information on is a separate matter.

Separate again is reqeust identification - associating a particular request
with metadata indended for it, such as the origin server to use (assuming
it's caching, and not replication, that's being used on the back end -- it's
really just a namespace to stick the request into, based on some aspect of
the full URI).


-- 
Mark Nottingham, Research Scientist
Akamai Technologies (San Mateo, CA)