The Network Operations Command Center (NOCC) at Akamai Technologies Global Headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. (Photo: Akamai)
When content delivery specialist Akamai acquired Linode in February, it described the transaction as a “transformative” deal that will expand its global infrastructure platform from the cloud to the edge. These included plans to expand Linode’s infrastructure to expand its cloud computing platform.
This week, Akamai fills in the details and announces plans for a significant expansion of Linode’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings, which previously included data centers in 11 global markets. This includes 12 new data center locations and 50 edge computing nodes.
“We plan to add more than a dozen new Linode data centers—equipped with Linode’s full suite of products—in North America, APAC, LATAM and Europe by the end of 2023,” wrote Shawn Michels, VO of Product Management for Computing at Akamai. in a blog post. “Our first proposed new location is in Ashburn, Virginia, later this year, with more to come in the first half of 2023. Along with Ashburn, we are seeking outreach in: Amsterdam, Chennai, Chicago, Delhi, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Osaka, Miami, Paris, Rome, Sao Paulo, Seattle and Stockholm to name a few.”
The additional data centers will allow Linode to develop availability zones for application resiliency, similar to Amazon Web Services. “Today, Linode doesn’t have availability zones, so that’s an evolution we’ll bring to them as we expand the service,” Michels told Protocol Enterprise.
Akamai will also introduce “Distributed Sites,” a new offering designed to bring essential computing power to locations “currently underserved by traditional cloud providers,” and has identified more than 50 cities for these deployments. Distributed sites are similar to cloud extensions like AWS Local Zones, Google Distributed Cloud or Microsoft Azure Edge modules. The aim will be to provide a lightweight computing infrastructure for applications with latency or localization requirements.
Akamai is a pioneer in online video delivery and has long been the largest content delivery network with more than 325,000 servers in a network spanning 135 countries around the world. Akamai delivers daily internet traffic of more than 100 terabits per second for blue-chip customers, including 56 percent of the Fortune 500. Akamai is also a leader in internet security and, as an early pioneer in distributed computing, has embraced edge computing services .
Linode specializes in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings for the developer community with 1 million customers in 185 countries and data centers in 11 global markets.
