Akamai earlier this year made a significant expansion into the edge computing space, snapping up infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider Linode for $900 million. The large content delivery network (CDN) provider is now set to drive that acquisition into work that initially started through a deal with Apple.

The Linode deal was announced in February. It was touted as a way for Akamai to accelerate its “edge-to-cloud” strategy, which included a range of serverless and edge-compute functionality.

Linode, which was founded in 2003, was a relatively small IaaS provider that offered low-cost, predominantly Linux-based cloud services, including virtual machines, Kubernetes, and block storage.

Shawn Michels, VP of product management at Akamai, said Linode is allowing the vendor to bridge the service gap between edge locations and centralized cloud resources. Michels explained this notion was boosted by what Akamai witnessed from its work with Apple.

Apple Core to Linode Buy

That work was initially announced in mid-2021, when Apple unveiled a preview of its iOS 15 platform. In addition to all the usual Apple cyclical updates, there was a new iCloud Private Relay internet privacy service included as part of its iCloud+ offer.

This private relay service is designed to prevent any single party from seeing web traffic information from a Safari browser user. It does this by sending traffic requests through two separate, secure internet relays.

A user’s IP address is visible to a user’s network provider and the first relay, which is operated by Apple, with the domain name system (DNS) record encrypted so neither party can see the website address. The second relay is operated by a third-party content provider like Akamai, which generates a temporary IP address, decrypts the name of the website requested, and connects the user to that site.

Michels explained that Apple was looking for something with more depth than Akamai’s EdgeWorkers serverless edge computing platform, not as deep as what Apple could get from a hyperscaler like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure, but it needed to be in a lot of locations.

“So we built Apple a distributed cloud compute platform, basically [virtual machines] running in dozens of locations directly on the Akamai backbone,” Michels said.

He added that the platform was devoid of “a lot of bells and whistles.”

“We’re not doing anything [platform-as-a-service] related for this use case. We’re not doing anything that’s kind of [software-as-a-service] related. It really is VMs on our global network,” Michels said.

The vendor came out of that deal thinking it was just a one-off use case specific to Apple’s unique architecture and needs. Instead, Akamai found that this custom platform could be tweaked to handle a range of use cases.

“Our second customer was a hyperscaler,” Michels said. “They came in and they had a workload that needed the distribution like Apple had but it needed copious amounts of egress capacity. At scale, the application that this hyperscaler is going to run needs 20 Tb/s of peak sustained traffic.”

This model has since steamrolled to where Akamai is finding a lot of its enterprise customers are looking for this mid-weight cloud service that allows for more precise control over their actual cloud usage.

“And that’s what really drove our acquisition of Linode,” Michels said.

He explained that Linode provided raw compute primitives, basic object storage, network services, and firewall and distributed denial of service [DDoS].

“The simplicity, the ease of use, the developer friendliness, that's kind of the first step in our compute evolution with Linode,” Michels added.

Akamai’s Edge Plans

Looking ahead, Michels laid out three areas of focus in updating its edge efforts.

The first is to further harden and expand the platform. He said this will involve improving the computational capacity within Linode's existing data centers and then expanding those locations over the next two years.

The next will be a more intense focus on enterprise feature sets that can operate in IaaS and PaaS environments. This will include integrating virtual private cloud [VPC] and availability zones to make it easier for enterprises to coordinate and run applications across different sites.

Akamai is also working on a new version of its serverless capabilities that are tied specifically back to the CDN.

Michels added that the serverless work will build toward growing out the capabilities of its EdgeWorkers platform and creating tighter integration between its various systems.

“Our goal is ultimately to say, OK developer, come build on top of Akamai within a single location,” Michels said. “Now that you're started and you're a Fortune 500 company, why not as your application starts developing, start using our distributed layer and start using our edge and really kind of grow from that very seed all the way up into a full-blown kind of edge-native application. That's the vision.”