What's front-end optimization? It's one of the new web acceleration strategies that is becoming a must-have feature for content delivery networks. That includes CDN market leader Akamai Technologies, which is acquiring front-end optimization specialist Blaze Software.
Dan Rayburn provides a good overview of the deal and its significance over at the Business of Video. "For content owners, it used to be that the answer to most website performance problems was either to add more hardware, use a CDN, or re-engineer their backend application code," Rayburn writes. "But for a number of reasons, investing in backend optimization is now providing diminishing returns. Google's research shows that for many popular sites it's the front-end that accounts for over 90% of a users wait time. Content delivery networks help to address part of this problem by reducing network latency, but even larger performance gains can be achieved through front-end optimization techniques that streamline the Web page HTML code and resources."
Earlier this year Dan wrote a deep dive into front-end optimization. For more on the topic, see my 2010 video interview with Joshua Bixby of Strangeloop Networks, another player in this space.
