Hi all
I am familiar with akamai and have implemented it on a few websites, (I am also familiar with their DSA servivce). I understand what they are good for and they can improve performance when used correctly.
To the best of my understanding of how this works, I really don't see how it can benefit a use case like authorize.net
Every single request MUST reach out to the origin server (authorize.net server), so all you are doing is adding another layer of latency. (yes akamai can possibly have a faster network connection from their edge server to the origin than you might have had on your own, but that is a marginal benefit, only usefull when most of your traffic is cached and only some of your traffic needs to go back to the origin. BUT in this case where 100% of your traffic needs to go back to the original I suspect that the added layer will not give me any benefit).
any failures at authorize.net will down the system and nothing akamai can do to help. what are the odds of a routing issue preventing you from reaching authorize.net but allowing you to reach akamai and allowing akamai to still be able to reach authorize.net, (Routing IP traffic around localized network failures happens all the time transparently for all traffic, akamai doesn't have any secret sauce here) (if you are in the US I doubt it, perhaps in other countries that is more likely???)
anyway that is my two cents of how I see it.
mn
