Akamai Technologies is expanding its cloud and infrastructure reach, rolling out its new Connected Cloud platform that integrates the vendor’s cloud, security, and content delivery network (CDN) capabilities targeting service holes from hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

The platform expansion involves Akamai constructing 13 new core cloud computing sites across the globe that will join its 11 existing core sites. Shawn Michels, VP of product management at Akamai, explained during a press briefing that three of the new sites will have availability in the United States and Europe by mid-year. The 10 additional sites are to be deployed around the world throughout the rest of the year.

Michels said the core sites are designed to meet the “performance and localization needs of our customers.” He added they were akin to AWS or GCP regions “where you have very highly scalable data centers and regions, with very broad computing capabilities, and with very dense compute resource capabilities.”

The new sites will include all of the cloud computing services Akamai acquired as part of its $900 million Linode purchase last year. Those new sites will also plug into Akamai’s current network backbone.

Akamai also has locations for more than 50 new “distributed sites” in “difficult-to-reach locations currently underserved by traditional clouds.” These sites sit between Akamai’s core sites and its approximately 4,100 localized edge sites across 135 countries.

The distributes sites will act as the compute and storage layer for the edge sites. Michels said this will allow the edge sites and end users to more quickly connect and enable distributed microservices that require more compute density than a regular edge site.

“This is [virtual machines], traditional VMs and container-type infrastructure, but in dozens to hundreds of locations across the globe, really with the idea of being able to get traditional compute into as many regions as possible,” Michels explained.

Michels added that this layered approach has “the goal of providing developers a broad set of architecture and infrastructure capabilities to match their workloads.” He explained this fills a need by customers that want to be able to construct their various microservices using Kubernetes as an orchestrator into more reliable and higher performing applications in edge environments.

“This combination of distributed sites, this combination of core sites, and then integrating those with the existing Akamai edge location, and then making sure that the edge, the core, and distributed sites are all running on a singular Akamai backbone, that really is what allows us to provide that kind of unrivaled network capability and allows us to really provide that continuum of compute – a set of varied infrastructure services across the core, distributed in edge – that allows the developer to have an infrastructure or a development platform at various locations that is customized and optimized for the needs of that service in that application,” Michels explained.

Those customers also want more options when it comes to selecting the type of infrastructure they can use for those services based on need. Michels said this was a segment that current hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP were not addressing.

“On one hand you have the approach that’s being taken from the hyperscalars, which is deep computing technology, deep sets of services, and a handful of regions. And then you have the CDNs – which even Akamai was doing – which is lightweight computing at the edge,” Michels said. “What we're hearing from our customers as they start to re-architect their services is that those two poles of compute don't really meet their needs and that there's a desire to create a broader continuum of infrastructure services and a broader continuum of compute so that they don't have to worry about sacrificing the performance or the scale of their applications as they start to re-architect.”

Outside of that layered reach, Akamai is also launching new optimization tools and pricing for data egress. This takes advantage of Akamai’s history as a CDN where it’s been focused on supporting high egress speed for its content customers.

“One of the things that we hear quite frequently from the customers is that egress from the existing cloud providers is an unbelievably big part of their bill, and also it tends to be one of the things that's most unpredictable in terms of the peaks and the valleys,” Michels said. “We will be bringing CDN-like economics to data transfer. Our goal is to help our customers by using our existing network capacity, by using our existing network throughput, and using our backbone infrastructure to really reduce the cost and drive down the cost of egress and transfer out the data centers.”