New locations and services expand Akamai’s cloud computing footprint

Akamai accelerated its cloud computing goals by acquiring Linode. Today, the company is moving forward. It is expanding its cloud computing services to Paris, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Seattle, and Chennai.

In these new sites, Akamai will launch premium instances for commercial workloads. Akamai’s object storage service can now store one petabyte and one billion objects per bucket. A new global load balancer combines Linode’s local traffic load balancer and Akama’s global traffic manager and application load balancer.

“Distributed workloads require distributed infrastructure,” said Akamai’s COO and Cloud Technology Group general manager Adam Karon. Legacy, centralized cloud architecture was not designed for developers and companies trying to deliver better user experiences that increasingly require putting applications and data closer to the customer.

At the Collision conference in Toronto last month, Akamai CEO Tom Leighton said the company is investing heavily to make Linode “usable by major enterprises for mission-critical applications.” The company released object storage upgrades today. He expects to help the company convert many media customers to cloud computing.

Akamai’s vast infrastructure allows it to offer lower bandwidth rates than other major cloud computing services.

“Ultimately, we’re going to make Linode even more developer-friendly and easy to use as we deploy the software in the existing Akamai platform to offer you containers in hundreds of places, for example,” he said.

Leighton said Akamai will add another dozen cloud computing locations in Q3.