Content delivery network (CDN) provider Akamai has launched three cloud computing sites in the U.S. and France, with more planned in the coming weeks in the U.S. and India. The firm this week announced the opening of facilities in Washington, DC, Chicago, and Paris, France, along with the launch of sites in Seattle and Chennai, India, later this quarter.
Akamai also disclosed additional instances, quadrupled the object storage product’s capacity to one petabyte and one billion items per bucket, and said it will later this year provide a load balancing solution. Akamai did not identify which colocation facility the additional cloud locations will be housed in.
This development marks a significant leap in Akamai’s initiative to deploy compute, storage, database, and other services atop its existing, powerful edge network – a sprawling infrastructure covering over 4,200 locations in 134 countries.
“Distributed workloads demand distributed infrastructure,” said Adam Karon, COO and General Manager of the Cloud Technology Group at Akamai Technologies. “He highlighted the limitations of traditional centralized cloud architecture, which he says doesn’t cater to the needs of today’s developers and companies that must deliver top-notch user experiences by situating applications and data in close proximity to the customer.”
Akamai has reengineered data center design principles for the rollout of these new sites, leveraging its extensive content delivery knowledge to interlink each site to its vast global network.
New Locations: Paris, Washington, D.C., and Chicago
“Distributed workloads demand distributed infrastructure,” said Adam Karon, COO and General Manager of the Cloud Technology Group at Akamai Technologies.Adam Karon, COO and General Manager of the Cloud Technology Group at Akamai Technologies“Distributed workloads demand distributed infrastructure,” said Adam Karon, COO and General Manager of the Cloud Technology Group at Akamai Technologies.
The locations of the new sites have been strategically chosen: Paris, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, with subsequent openings planned in Seattle and Chennai, India. All the sites are designed to offer high-performance, scalable cloud resources on the Akamai global network.
The Washington, D.C. site is positioned in what is frequently considered the world’s data center capital. Northern Virginia houses over half of the total primary data center market inventory in the U.S. Meanwhile, the Chicago site, placed in the world’s fifth-largest data center market, presents a compelling option for businesses running latency-sensitive, multicloud workloads. The upcoming Seattle site will tap into the expanding developer and startup ecosystem in the eighth-largest U.S. market, a significant data center hub for the Pacific Northwest.
The Paris location will support European Union companies in addressing mounting data sovereignty issues, given Paris’s highest data center capacity in Europe. Akamai’s Chennai site is expected to tap into one of India’s biggest IT hubs, given a recent survey indicated almost half of Akamai’s Indian partners forecasted that 21-40% of their IT budgets would be allocated to cloud spending.
Akamai’s shift in approach to cloud computing is fuelled by the demands of next-gen applications that require significantly lower latency and better egress than traditional cloud providers can offer, according to Adam Karon.
Object Storage Product
In addition to the new sites, Akamai announced the launch of premium instances designed for commercial workloads. These instances offer consistent performance, predictable resource allocation, and simple SKU management. This allows for easier management of multiple deployments and upgrades without the hassle of intricate SKU matching.
Further, the company has doubled the capacity of its object storage product to accommodate one petabyte and one billion objects per bucket, enabling businesses to handle higher data volumes and build scalable, low-latency cloud-native applications and analytics solutions.
Lastly, Akamai plans to introduce Akamai Global Load Balancer later this quarter, an integrated service resulting from the acquisition of Linode. This global load balancing feature ensures no single point of failure by directing traffic requests to the optimal data center, reducing latency.
All these new developments constitute part of Akamai Connected Cloud, a distributed platform for cloud computing, security, and content delivery designed to keep applications closer and threats farther away. Announced earlier this year, Akamai Connected Cloud capitalizes on the company’s 25 years of experience in scaling and securing the internet for the world’s biggest corporations.
