Akamai introduces Cloudlets

Akamai Technologies, Inc. has announced availability of Cloudlets, extensions to Akamai solutions that are designed to speed time to market for developers and offload infrastructure demand, each providing a specific and useful functionality that is accessed via the Akamai Intelligent Platform™.

Instead of relying on resource intensive internal or third-party IT projects, Cloudlets allow customers to do more with the Akamai Intelligent Platform, in a way that is self-serviceable, alleviating the need for further infrastructure investment or the development of custom tooling. By offloading business logic to one of the world’s most pervasive, performant and scalable delivery networks, as well as incorporating “click to buy” and “click to provision and configure” deployment, Cloudlets can offer faster time to market for advanced functionality while reducing development, infrastructure, and maintenance costs.

Akamai Cloudlets are being introduced with the availability of Edge Redirector, Visitor Prioritization and Image Converter. The company plans to continue to introduce new Cloudlets regularly, ultimately forming a marketplace of extensions where customers can choose which capabilities are best suited to help simplify the development and delivery of their web sites and applications.

One early adopter of Akamai Cloudlets is EL AL Israel Airlines Ltd. via Akamai partner ITWay Solutions LTD. According to Patrick Perelsztejn, Web infrastructure & technologies coordinator for the airline, “We had an immediate need to set up 5,000 redirects to preserve link equity for SEO, due to our website restructuring. When initially looking for a solution, it appeared there was going to be no easy and flexible way for us to address our needs. Edge Redirector was a perfect solution, which helped us to easily manage this large number of URL redirects and avoid the cost associated with a custom solution.”

The three inaugural Cloudlets include:
Edge Redirector – Edge Redirector is intended to help customers simplify the management of URL redirects for SEO, marketing campaigns, or site content and architectural changes by providing an easy way for both technical and non-technical users to manage redirect rules and offload strain on IT. By managing large volumes of redirects on the Akamai Intelligent Platform online businesses can speed time to market for Web site content or architectural changes while taking advantage of the performance and offload benefit of the Akamai Intelligent Platform. Edge Redirector capabilities include:
· Easy management and offload of 301 and 302 redirects to the Akamai Intelligent Platform
· Ability to make changes quickly with an intuitive rules based user interface and included API
· Advanced and basic user roles for both technical and business users
· Bulk upload redirects via .csv format

Visitor Prioritization – Visitor Prioritization is designed to provide a user-friendly waiting room experience when back-end applications become overloaded due to surges in visitor traffic, helping to decrease site abandonment when application capacity becomes scarce. Customers can avoid the cost and maintenance of building out unnecessary infrastructure to support spikes in traffic that would be under-utilised during periods of normal traffic, making more efficient use of existing resources.

The features of Visitor Prioritization include:
· Ability to gain control of traffic accessing data center resources during traffic surges
· An engaging, branded experience for overflow traffic
· Protection from site outages during high value or maintenance events
· Preservation of scarce application capacity for valuable transactions

Image Converter – Image Converter is intended to help simplify the complexity and overhead associated with creating, storing and maintaining derivative images when the same image is used in different Web and mobile experiences across multiple end user situations and devices. By dynamically manipulating images in the cloud (cropping, resizing, changing output format and/or output quality, watermarking, etc.) customers can reduce infrastructure investment and gain operational efficiencies, decreasing time to market via web design and development agility, particularly for sites using responsive web design and RESS. Capabilities associated with Image Converter include:
· Reduced volume of bytes necessary to deliver images within a responsive web design experience to various devices
· Dynamic manipulations of images in the cloud, tailoring them to the specific use case defined by an API command
· Reduced complexity and overhead associated with creating storing and maintaining libraries of derivative images

“Akamai is well known for our solutions that help our customers make their web experiences fast, reliable and secure. With the introduction of Cloudlets, we continue to extend the value our platform provides to our customers via a new set of capabilities that are designed to provide a positive impact on the overall user experience,” explained Ravi Maira, vice president, Web Experience Business Unit, Akamai. “As important, we are giving our customers these capabilities in a self-service manner that is easy, convenient and as cost effective to deploy as possible.”