INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud
Akamai unveils ‘ the most exciting thing to happen to the cloud in a decade ’
The Gecko initiative the latest move toward Akamai becoming a key platform in enterprise multicloud environments .
This will bring full-stack computing to hundreds of previously hard-to-reach locations , allowing customers to move workloads closer to their users . By injecting cloud computing into places that traditional cloud providers have struggled to reach , developers will no longer have to think about building for the cloud or building for the Edge .
As developers demand more from their cloud and edge providers , Akamai ’ s plan is to unlock opportunities to innovate across the entire continuum of compute by driving the convergence necessary to put cloud computing power at the Edge – convergence not possible before Gecko .
“ Gecko is the most exciting thing to happen to the cloud in a decade ,” said Dr . Tom Leighton , Akamai Co-Founder and CEO .
Akamai has unveiled plans to embed cloud computing capabilities into its massive edge network . Akamai ’ s Generalized Edge Compute ( Gecko ) advances Akamai ’ s strategy to be the cloud computing platform for companies that want to deliver better experiences by running workloads closer to users , devices and sources of data .
The new initiative is the latest move in Akamai ’ s multiyear strategy to become a key platform in enterprise multicloud environments and another step in the company ’ s vision for a new kind of cloud designed to meet the needs of modern applications that require higher performance , lower latency and true global scalability .
Akamai has been conducting early trials of Gecko with several of its enterprise customers . The company anticipates that customers in AI inferencing , multiplayer gaming and social and streaming media are best positioned to take advantage of the power of Gecko .
Akamai sees future use cases in areas such as immersive retail , spatial computing , data analytics , and consumer and industrial IoT .
Current industry architectures treat cloud and edge networks separately . Gecko is designed to enable generalized compute to be deployed on top of Akamai ’ s existing worldwide edge network , taking advantage of existing tools , processes and observability to provide a consistent experience across the entire continuum of compute from cloud to edge .
Gecko will move heavier , traditional compute – usually confined to centralized data centers – to the Edge of Akamai ’ s network .
“ It ’ s the next phase of the roadmap toward a more connected cloud we laid out when we acquired Linode to add cost-effective , cloud-native computing capabilities to our portfolio .
“ We began delivering on that roadmap with the launch of Akamai Connected Cloud and the rapid rollout of new core computing regions around the world .
“ With Gecko , we ’ re furthering that vision by combining the computing power of our cloud platform with the proximity and efficiency of the Edge , to put workloads closer to users than any other cloud provider . When we say we operate at planetary scale , this is what we mean .”
The scale of Akamai ’ s network , comprising 4,100 points of presence around the globe , makes Akamai Connected Cloud the world ’ s most distributed cloud platform . p
www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO NORTH AMERICA 65