Akamai has announced the opening of seven new cloud regions before November. They will be spread throughout America, Asia and Europe. Specifically, they will be in the Netherlands (Amsterdam), the United States (Los Angeles and Miami), Italy (Milan), Japan (Osaka), Indonesia (Jakarta) and Brazil (Sao Paulo). This expansion of cloud regions is the third since Akamai acquired Linode last year.
Akamai generally uses providers to host private servers and network equipment in third-party data centers (colocation) for its cloud regions. But on this occasion he has not made any statements about which facilities the infrastructure for these new regions will be housed in. You will probably use Linode installations in some cases.
Founded in 2003, when Akamai bought it, it operated in the colocation space sector in 11 data centers spread across the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Singapore and Australia. In July of this year, Akamai announced locations in Washington DC and Chicago (United States), as well as Paris, and plans to open more towards the end of the quarter in Seattle and Chennai (India).
This has led to Akamai opening 13 new major regions over the past three months. It currently has regions in Atlanta, Dallas, Fremont, Newark and Toronto (USA), Frankfurt (Germany), London (United Kingdom), Mumbai (India), Singapore, Sydney (Australia) and Tokyo (Japan). It recently announced the opening of another in Stockholm (Sweden).
Akamai has also confirmed its plans to open more regions before the end of this year. Among them, one in Madrid, but also in Seoul (South Korea) and Auckland (New Zealand). And beyond these, they intend to launch several dozen what they call “distributed regions,” which are “designed to provide basic computing functions in places that are difficult to reach and where traditional cloud providers provide fewer services than they need«.
Adam Karon, General and Operations Manager, Akamai Cloud Technology Grouphas also highlighted that «The need for companies to offer a better user experience increasingly exposes the limits of the old centralized cloud model. We are fixing this issue for customers by changing the script. With Akamai Connected Cloud, we are taking an outside-in, delivery-centric approach based on a commitment to cloud-native technologies and the same network that many of the world’s leading companies have relied on for more than two decades. It is an approach focused on a future where scale is as important as the size of the network and data center«.
Launched earlier this year 2023, Akamai Connected Cloud is intended as a more distributed alternative to AWS and Azure. It offers dedicated and shared CPU, GPU, containers, storage, databases, and serverless services.
