New initiative, code-named Gecko, accelerates Akamai’s build-out of the world’s most distributed cloud computing platform
Akamai Technologies, the cloud company that powers and protects life online, 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.
Akamai’s move comes at an exciting juncture for the technology industry. In a worldwide study conducted in 2023, ClearPath Strategies found that two-thirds of IT decision-makers said their use of distributed cloud services is expected to increase over the next 12 months. More than one-third of respondents said the benefits of distributed cloud — including the ability to process and analyze AI and machine learning data quickly and efficiently — are mission critical to their IT strategy.
The new initiative is the latest move in Akamai’s multiyear strategy to become a key platform in enterprise multicloud environments. It is 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 that current cloud architectures were not built to provide.
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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. 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. “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.”
SOURCE: PRNewswire