I think this is Akamai figuring out they need to address the self-serve market.
Akamai has 6x the edge network footprint of Cloudflare and has all the cool trendy stuff like edge workers, they just suck at selling to the developer.
> Akamai has 6x the edge network footprint of Cloudflare and has all the cool trendy stuff like edge workers, they just suck at selling to the developer.
Akamai sucks at selling to everyone.
Here's a typical Akamai experience:
* An Account Manager (AM) - in a suit - he is going to be the one talking. Not an expert in anything, except maybe Brooks Brothers suits from a few seasons ago.
* Account Manager's Lackey (AML) - he is going to be the one with an iPad. His job is to type in the notes of the meeting, typically using a two finger peck method. This of course takes a very long time. So everyone speaks slowly. Sometimes AM would ask AML something about things that are coming or being rolled out using Akamai internal jargon.
* Account Manager's Attachment (AMA) - does not really talk, looks uncomfortable. Based on the way AMA is dressed it might be a sales engineer
* Every single response to your question would be something that you can either find on the website ( AM, AML and AMA are convinced you cannot read ) which does not actually answer the question or is met with "I will need to loop in the appropriate parties and get you an answer"
* Nearly every request that one would presume can be completed programatically is met with "We need to engage professional services for that." which is billed at some insane amount
That's experience of paying Akamai millions of dollars a year. Needless to say, spending three years untangling Akamai integration was worth it.
I used to sit on an akamai customer panel. ~10 years ago at their conferences they were talking about to lower the sales burden. Pricing, Digital signup. Clearly they think it will devalue thjeir existing product.
Historically that's all there was. Random companies didn't need CDNs and associated services. They ran a couple servers in a data-center somewhere and called it good. Not like a website for a company that manufactures dairy processing equipment needs to handle a lot of load. The big corporate customers where who bought that stuff. Then AWS came along.
It's a classic case of not seeing the up and coming market because you were winning the existing market.
Linode isn't used by Akamai customers and won't be.
It would be a much bigger hurdle for Linode to become enterprise-friendly than for Akamai to become developer-friendly.
Akamai is "call for pricing" because they never evolved from an enterprise product. And no "enterprise" just buys off the shelf. They negotiate with a long budget, vendor risk management, legal, etc. process. Its unlikely that many of their contracts are even the same verbiage.
But we can all think of 100s of companies that did not do this and either died or are hollow shells of their former selves.
Cloudflare et al are commoditizing their gig. As more new blood goes into enterprises, they’ll want to use what they’re already familiar with vs the big enterprise thing they’ve never touched and find awkward.
I don’t know that a) I’m right or b) that they’ll be successful.
But Enterprising Linode would be folly. Even late entrants like Oracle Cloud are struggling due to lack of support from Enterprise cloud products. Changing them to support all the annoying acronym requirements of an Enterprise is a many year journey. AWS and Azure really only did that to support their huge government contracts.
I think the only other viable theory is for them to try and keep Linode as Linode as just a diversification play.
That would be odd, to me at least, because they’re buying an offering that seems to be slowly dying anyway. It really never left the hobbyist/tiny shop market, and even there, AWS/Azure is eating into them. I do have a soft spot for them as they’re a much more “human” company.
I find this unlikely. It would be a massive waste of capital to have acquired a developer-focused company such as as Linode only to make it, “contact us for pricing.” I think it’s more likely that they will sell the CDN product as another service within Linode.
As someone who has used Akamai and talked to them, they seem to be so rooted in, talk to your account manager for it, who will just upsell you stuff you don't need.
Not to mention that until they finally had a first-class Terraform provider, their CDN was absolute nightmare to manage at-scale. If you only have a handful of properties then sure, it's fine. You can just point-and-click your way around and make it work. Anything more than that and it was very painful.
Yeah I seem to remember they became well-known when they were the CDN for the Apple Trailers site around the (Sorenson encoded) Episode 1 Trailer times?
That figure is misleading. Every one of Cloudflare’s pops run every service they offer. A large number of Akamai’s are running small CDN only deployments. They also have 20 worldwide ddos scrubbing centers. Cloudflare’s 250 pops all do it.
It’s not really apples to apples in terms of scale in the context of footprint
Have they gotten faster at applying updates? it would take something like 45 minutes to an hour to make any changes back in 2014, when Fastly was doing sub-minute updates for any CDN changes.
They have had "edge workers" in some form or another for 20 years. Most of the common use cases for things you'd want to do at the edge could be done in their config programming language. Now they have VMs/containers in 15k+ locations.
Akamai has 6x the edge network footprint of Cloudflare and has all the cool trendy stuff like edge workers, they just suck at selling to the developer.