Akamai's Public Cloud Platform: Global Network, Innovative Products, and Future Plans

Akamai's Public Cloud Platform: Global Network, Innovative Products, and Future PlansAs a leading global provider of cloud services and cybersecurity solutions, Akamai continues to invest heavily in its public cloud platform, committed to delivering high-performance, cost-effective, and reliable cloud services to enterprise clients. Recently, Li Wentao, Head of Akamai's Asia Pacific Cloud Computing Expert Team, provided insights into Akamai's public cloud platform's latest advancements, future plans, and interpretation of cloud computing industry trends at a media briefing

Akamai's Public Cloud Platform: Global Network, Innovative Products, and Future Plans

As a leading global provider of cloud services and cybersecurity solutions, Akamai continues to invest heavily in its public cloud platform, committed to delivering high-performance, cost-effective, and reliable cloud services to enterprise clients. Recently, Li Wentao, Head of Akamai's Asia Pacific Cloud Computing Expert Team, provided insights into Akamai's public cloud platform's latest advancements, future plans, and interpretation of cloud computing industry trends at a media briefing.

Akamai has built a robust global data center network, currently deploying 29 large-scale and 10 smaller data centers (primarily for edge and distributed computing) worldwide. This extensive infrastructure network has seen significant expansion in the Asia-Pacific region, particularly to meet the strong demand from Chinese businesses aggressively expanding into overseas markets. Data centers in Singapore, Tokyo, Mumbai, Osaka, Melbourne, and Jakarta have been deployed, with further expansion into South America and Africa, providing broader global coverage for Chinese enterprises and supporting their international business development.

Li Wentao emphasized that since acquiring public cloud provider Linode two years ago, Akamai has tripled its global data center capacity and number. This significant expansion not only reflects Akamai's strong commitment to public cloud development but also directly enhances its ability and efficiency in serving clients, offering them a wider range of more efficient service options.

The Akamai public cloud platform's network advantage stems from the deep integration of its global backbone network and CDN. Li Wentao noted that Akamai seamlessly integrates its public cloud data centers with its global backbone network, ensuring users receive high-quality service via a high-speed interconnected network, regardless of the data center used. Furthermore, Akamai's global backbone network also serves as the backbone for its CDN, further enhancing network throughput and end-user experience, providing users with more stable and faster network connections.

Moreover, Akamai's public cloud platform is fully interconnected with major cloud providers such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Tencent Cloud. This multi-cloud interconnection strategy offers users greater flexibility, enabling more efficient management of applications deployed across different cloud platforms. It also significantly improves inter-application performance and mitigates reliance on a single cloud provider, reducing risk.

To enhance the Akamai public cloud platform's capabilities and provide clients with a richer selection of services, Akamai has recently launched several significant product updates. Akamai Application Platform is a major enhancement to its Kubernetes offering, designed to help clients better embrace open source and reduce dependence on single cloud providers. The platform provides open-source based Kubernetes application deployment templates with one-click deployment capabilities, effectively lowering the barrier to entry and simplifying deployment processes for clients adopting open-source software.

Simultaneously, Akamai launched its Database-as-a-Service offering, initially providing PostgreSQL and MySQL database services. It supports advanced enterprise features such as high reliability, multi-node, and multi-replica configurations, meeting the demands of enterprise-grade applications. In the future, Akamai plans to introduce Redis and NoSQL database services, further expanding its database product line and providing a more comprehensive database solution.

Akamai also released its second-generation object storage product (Gen2), offering significant improvements in access performance and capacity compared to its predecessor. Individual buckets can support up to 20,000 requests per second, with capacity increased to 5PB and the number of objects per bucket reaching 10 billion, fully meeting the most demanding enterprise-level storage requirements and providing users with more powerful data storage capabilities.

Additionally, Akamai introduced instances based on NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada GPUs, suitable for various scenarios such as video transcoding and AI inference. Compared to AWS's G6/G5/G4 series virtual machines, Akamai's GPU instances exhibit higher throughput and lower costs in generative AI inference scenarios like "text-to-image" generation, providing users with more cost-effective AI computing resources.

Looking ahead to 2025, Li Wentao stated that Akamai will continue to increase investments in public cloud development, launching more high-value-added industry solutions. In the streaming media field, Akamai will provide end-to-end media transcoding, encoding, and workflow solutions, and plans to release cloud host products based on Intel VPUs to reduce streaming media processing costs and improve efficiency, providing more comprehensive services for the streaming media industry.

Akamai highly values its relationships with partners, distributors, and software ISVs, committed to recruiting more like-minded partners to jointly assist clients in their cloud-native and open-source business transformations. Akamai boasts over 4,000 edge nodes and 29 core cloud data centers globally, covering major destinations for Chinese businesses expanding overseas. By providing professional consulting and technical platform support, Akamai helps Chinese enterprises succeed in overseas markets, offering strong support for their international business expansion.

In helping businesses overcome challenges in cloud adoption, Li Wentao offered three strategic recommendations: first, consider cloud lock-in effects and avoid being tied to a single cloud provider; second, focus on the sustainability of cloud costs, avoiding excessive costs later on due to initially using full-service cloud providers; and third, prioritize local consulting and service capabilities to ensure timely and effective support during overseas expansion. These recommendations provide valuable guidance for businesses in selecting and using cloud services.

Finally, addressing the trend of AI large model development shifting from training to inference, Li Wentao expressed agreement. He pointed out that the future AI inference market will account for 90% of the market share, and the demand for cloud services will become more diversified. Akamai, by launching instances based on RTX 4000 Ada GPUs and leveraging edge data center resources, provides clients with high-performance, low-latency, and cost-effective AI inference services. Simultaneously, Akamai is actively exploring more related products, such as vector databases and AI gateways, to further enhance its AI inference cloud services and meet the growing demand for AI inference. Akamai aims to become a leading cloud service provider in the AI inference field, providing clients with more comprehensive AI solutions.

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