Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai Akamai
Earlier this year, when Akamai purchased infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform provider Linode for approximately $900 million, it was unclear how the content delivery network (CDN ) and Akamai’s security services would work well with Linode’s developer-friendly solution. , Linux-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud. Now we know that Akamai didn’t just add cloud; he was working on the synergies of edge computing and cloud development. The company is adding more than a dozen new Linode data centers around the world by the end of 2023.
Why? As Akamai CEO Tom Leighton explained, “Linode was an early pioneer in creating the alternative cloud market.” Instead of offering all the bells and whistles of hypercloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, Linode has grown by offering developers an affordable way to build new applications. . Meanwhile, Akamai’s original CDN operations, dating back to the late 90s, were the predecessor to edge computing.
Put them together, and Leighton proclaims, “Akamai is moving from delivering and securing applications to enabling developers to learn from them. With Linode, we are taking the next major step in our evolution: marrying Linode’s experience in cloud computing with Akamai’s leadership in scale and security to create the world’s most distributed computing platform. »
It seems to work. In Akamai’s latest financial report, its third-quarter security software revenue was $380 million, up 13%, while its compute revenue was $109 million. , up 72%.
Leighton said the company is making “good progress integrating Linode into our edge platform and adding the capabilities and scale needed to support mission-critical applications for large enterprises. In particular, we have connected all of Linode’s 11 existing sites into our private backbone, enabling us to deliver lower latency, higher throughput and improved egress economics.”
Akamai has other plans to leverage the Linode platform with its advanced computing resources. This includes, Leighton said, “a lighter deployment model that is suitable for large-scale distribution. This will allow us to bring compute closer to end users around the world. We plan to deploy several dozen of these lighter models on sites. next year, in which case we expect to compare well to hyperscalers in terms of points of presence and proximity to enterprise data centers and end users.”
Also: Cybersecurity, cloud and coding: why these three skills will be at the forefront of demand in 2023
But, wait, there’s more. Akamai announced its investment and partnership with Macrometa, a leading cloud computing company. What Macrometa brings to the table is a state-of-the-art platform for developers to store, process, and serve data as stateful programs and application programming interfaces (APIs) with very low latencies. Together, the two companies will help enterprise developers build, deploy, and run programs across the edge and cloud. The hope is to combine cloud and edge computing “into one seamless multicloud/polycloud platform.”
Chetan Venkatesh, Founder and CEO of Macrometa, boldly asserts, “We give developers superpowers. The ability to build these kinds of apps, at the speed and speed the business demands, feels like magic. for the casual observer. But that’s the beauty of what this great platform does.”
While I don’t expect Akamai to appear in a Marvel movie anytime soon, it looks set to become the top choice for cloud developers in the future.
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