Akamai Technologies has unveiled plans to embed cloud computing capabilities into its massive edge network.
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.
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.”
Akamai is rolling out a fast-paced, but pragmatic, roadmap for Gecko. In its first phase, announced today, Akamai aims to embed compute with support for virtual machines into 100 cities by the end of the year.
In the second phase of Gecko, which is expected to kick off later this year, the company plans to add containers to the mix.
In Gecko’s third phase, Akamai plans to add automated workload orchestration to make it easier for developers to build applications across hundreds of distributed locations, with the end goal of creating a consistent user experience between each core computing region and the edge.
