Akamai Technologies today launched an initiative that promises to make it simpler to centrally manage and deploy application workloads on edge computing platforms.
Shawn Michels, vice president for product management for cloud computing Akamai, said a Generalized Edge Compute (Gecko) offering leverages the global points of presence (PoPs) that Akamai uses for its content delivery network (CDN) to now deploy application workload managed via the Linode cloud service the company acquired in 2022.
At the core of this offering is a set of virtual machines that enable a full stack of application software to be deployed in an edge computing environment to eliminate latency that would otherwise be encountered when transferring data to a cloud computing environment. The ultimate goal is to provide IT organizations with a federated set of services they can employ to process data where it makes the most sense based on performance requirements, said Michels.
For example, applications infused with artificial intelligence (AI) will need to be able to invoke enough compute resources to run inference engines at the edge, while other less compute-intensive application workloads are best deployed in cloud computing environments, he noted.
Michels added that rather than locking IT teams into a specific architecture, Akamai is committing to meeting IT organizations where they are, including adding support for containers running on Kubernetes clusters in its PoPs later this year.
Akamai has more than 4,100 points of presence around the globe. With the acquisition of Linode, Akamai added a set of cloud computing services to compete directly against hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google by making cloud services available at a lower cost at a time when more organizations than ever are concerned about the total cost of IT.
In its first phase of Gecko, Akamai will provide access to virtual machines in 100 locations by the end of the year. Akamai has already deployed Gecko servers in Hong Kong SAR; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Querétaro, Mexico; and Johannesburg, South Africa, as well as in cities without a concentrated hyperscaler presence, including Bogotá, Colombia; Denver, Colorado; Houston, Texas; Hamburg, Germany; and Marseille, France. Deployment of a tenth Gecko region this quarter is planned for Santiago, Chile. Akamai is committing to adding hundreds of cities to its global cloud computing footprint over the next several years.
In the longer term, Akamai also plans to add automated workload orchestration to make it easier for developers to build applications across hundreds of distributed locations.
More workloads than ever are being deployed at the network edge as IT teams look to deploy software closer to the point where data is being created and consumed. That will require extending the reach of existing DevOps workflows to edge computing environments that will be based on everything from x86 and Arm processors to graphical processor units (GPUs).
The challenge, as always, will be finding a way to effectively manage those workloads when the IT teams responsible for them are often physically located thousands of miles away.