Akamai Technologies today unveiled a cloud computing service that combines its ability to deploy applications at the edge with the cloud platform it gained via its acquisition of Linode.
Shawn Michels, vice president of product management for compute and apps at Akamai, said Akamai Connected Cloud will provide the foundation for running a new generation of modern applications that require access to both core infrastructure resources in the cloud alongside highly distributed edge computing services.
As part of the effort to deliver that combination of services, in the second quarter Akamai is adding three sites in the U.S. to the 11 it already provides. In addition, Akamai revealed it had identified 10 additional cloud sites and 50 distributed edge computing sites that it will add throughout the rest of this year.
As a long-time provider of a content delivery network, Akamai manages a massive distributed computing environment that spans 4,100 locations across 135 countries. The acquisition of Linode added a set of cloud computing services that enable Akamai to offer the same set of services, including CDN services, as cloud service providers.
Akamai is now signaling it will compete more aggressively by discounting the egress fees charged whenever data is moved off a cloud platform. One of the most expensive and unpredictable costs is the egress fees cloud service providers charge whenever data is moved off their platforms, noted Michels.
Finally, Akamai also revealed it has achieved ISO, SOC2 and HIPAA standards compliance for its services.
Akamai is making a case for an alternative approach to cloud computing that it said will be optimized for both existing monolithic applications running on virtual machines and cloud-native applications based on containers and serverless computing frameworks. A recent survey of 458 development professionals, managers and senior leaders conducted by Techstrong Research, a sister entity of DevOps.com, found 43% of respondents are considering adding additional cloud service providers in the next 12 months. Nearly two-thirds said they are at least considering, evaluating or are ready to buy from a trusted alternative cloud vendor, with 20% reporting they have already contracted with one.
It’s not clear whether IT organizations might actually migrate existing applications from one cloud service provider to another. At the very least, Akamai expects that as new applications are developed, the company will be able to gain a larger share of the overall market.
There’s no doubt that a new era of cloud computing is dawning as organizations look to deploy distributed applications that process and analyze data closer to the point where it is created and consumed. These applications will then share the results of the data processed at the edge with, for example, centralized data lakes that make it possible to analyze data collected across a distributed computing environment.
The one thing DevOps teams can count on is that as this next era of cloud computing evolves, the management of IT environments will become much more challenging for all concerned.