Akamai expands its cloud computing footprint with new locations and services

Acquiring Linode allowed Akamai to fast-track its broader cloud computing ambitions. Today, the company is taking another step in this direction. It’s announcing the expansion of its cloud computing services to five new locations: Paris, Washington, D.C. and Chicago, which are going live now, and Seattle and Chennai, which will open later this quarter.

Akamai is also launching a set of new premium instances for commercial workloads, which will go live in these newly launched sites. Users of Akamai’s object storage service can now also store twice as much data: up to one petabyte and one billion objects per bucket. There’s also a new global load balancer, which bridges the functionality of Linode’s load balancer for local traffic load balancing and Akamai’s global traffic manager and application load balancer.

“Distributed workloads require distributed infrastructure,” said Adam Karon, chief operating officer and general manager of the Cloud Technology Group at Akamai. “Legacy, centralized cloud architecture was not designed for the demands of developers and companies challenged with delivering better user experiences that increasingly require putting applications and data closer to the customer.”

When I talked to Akamai CEO Tom Leighton at the Collision conference in Toronto last month, he noted that the company is investing heavily to upgrade Linode to “be usable by major enterprises for mission-critical applications.” He specifically mentioned upgrades to object storage, which the company released today. He expects this will allow the company to bring a lot of its media customers to its cloud computing service.

He also believes Akamai has an advantage here because its vast existing infrastructure allows it to offer bandwidth rates that are lower than those offered by other major cloud computing services.

“Ultimately, we’re going to make Linode even more developer-friendly and easy to use as we deploy the software in the existing Akamai platform so that we can offer you containers in hundreds of places, for example,” he said.