Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform shields everything, from the cloud to enterprise, so top brands can keep decisions, apps and experiences closer to users than ever before while keeping attacks far away.
Akamai today unveiled enhancements to their Edge Platform, designed to give developers even greater power to craft and deliver exceptional user experiences at the edge. These updates offer greater flexibility for EdgeWorkers, making deploying code easier at the edge.
1. EdgeKV Database
Akamai recently unveiled Edge Platform enhancements that protect content, apps and APIs, accelerate web and mobile experiences and give developers the power to create secure yet fast-acting compute at the edge. Furthermore, these features enable businesses to accelerate their cloud migration strategies.
Akamai’s recent upgrades provide intelligent security automation and advanced threat protection for web apps. Furthermore, Akamai has enhanced EdgeWorkers, its serverless edge compute solution that lets developers leverage the Akamai network to deploy microservices and access secure, fast-acting computation at the edge.
Introducing the EdgeKV Database
EdgeKV is a globally distributed key-value store designed to simplify and accelerate data operations for EdgeWorkers applications. It boasts high availability, low latency, and an intuitive query language that makes it simple to read/write/update data quickly.
The EdgeKV data model utilizes logical containers called namespaces to organize and manage your data. Each namespace can be connected to an Akamai Control Center access group which governs user permissions for that space. Furthermore, administrators have the power to alter a namespace’s geoLocation in order to optimize performance on staging or production networks.
Akamai replicates data stored in an EdgeKV namespace across multiple locations based on the configured geoLocation of each namespace, to ensure that if a cold hit occurs, the data can be quickly and precisely requested from its closest replicated location.
Furthermore, when updating an object in an EdgeKV namespace, the object must be consistently updated before a read operation can be executed against it. This ensures EdgeKV achieves an SLA of 10 seconds or less for write requests, drastically cutting down response time to these requests.
EdgeKV not only speeds up response times at the edge, but it provides a consistent user experience and better insight into activity at the edge. Furthermore, organizations now have more choices when it comes to scaling their edge computing environments.
EdgeKV requires developers to have access to an Akamai Control Center account, which can be done either through API calls, CLI commands or the Control Center Console. To learn more about establishing and managing an Akamai Control Center account, contact your local Akamai representative or visit their Identity and Access Management documentation.
2. Edge Analytics
Edge Analytics allows for efficient data processing at the edge, while taking into account memory and storage limitations. It is a key feature of the Intelligent Edge Platform which delivers content and services to end users on the internet.
Personalized recommendations and real-time offers to customers are an integral part of the digital experience for organizations. To provide these personalized services, organizations must manage a vast amount of data in real time, then deliver those recommendations at precisely the right moment. This process necessitates efficient computations that utilize available resources efficiently.
Akamai introduced EdgeKV, an edge database that serves as a key value store and fast access to security and other data at the edge. This feature enables content companies to deliver optimized and legal content based on customers’ location and other attributes.
Additionally, the company has unveiled a selection of performance options for its serverless edge compute solution EdgeWorkers. These include two tiers tailored towards applications requiring lower CPU and memory consumption.
These tiers offer free usage for up to 30 million events per month per resource tier. To try EdgeWorkers, speak to your Akamai account representative or visit the Evaluation Tier in Akamai Marketplace today!
Akamai is one of the world’s largest distributed computing platforms, boasting more than 4,200 points of presence (PoPs) around the globe. Thousands of enterprises and developers rely on this platform for security and optimization of their apps, websites, and services.
Akamai provides edge analytics to businesses, allowing them to make informed decisions based on real-time data without sacrificing time or privacy. Furthermore, Akamai provides efficient communication and bandwidth management.
The intelligent edge platform provides businesses with a rapid delivery system for digital services and apps. Its scalable infrastructure ensures an uninterrupted connection to users around the globe, helping businesses reduce costs and enhance customer experiences.
3. Edge Security
Akamai has recently introduced enhancements to its edge platform that enable businesses to create and deploy innovative digital experiences at the edge. These improvements include security, speed and performance reporting to the Akamai Control Center as well as automation tools for application- and API-level cybersecurity.
Real-time protection of applications and websites has become increasingly important as hackers increasingly leverage vulnerabilities at the edge to target endpoints in various ways. To combat this, the company is introducing new content security capabilities that intelligently serve or block access to malicious content through integrated Virtual Private Network (VPN) proxy detection services and Domain Name System (DNS) proxy detection features. Furthermore, it’s upgrading its Token Authentication capability so web sites and apps can more easily detect malicious activity.
These updates are part of Akamai’s strategy to help companies keep decisions, apps and experiences closer to users than anyone else – while keeping attacks far away. Leading brands around the world rely on Akamai to run their digital infrastructures efficiently at scale with optimal quality and dependability.
Retailers, for instance, can utilize edge networks to process data captured by on-site cameras, AI trained to recognize inventory items and kiosks that accurately charge customers’ accounts without waiting in line. Healthcare providers too can benefit from edge networks by making surgeries less invasive and shorter while giving them better insight into patient health.
The company has recently added EdgeKV capabilities to their edge platform, providing high-availability and low-latency access to data at the edge. This globally distributed key-value store gives developers a way to connect edge applications and databases, with role-based access controls preventing unauthorized use of EdgeKV database data.
It has also enhanced its API acceleration solution to guarantee API transactions are efficient, prioritizing routing and reserving capacity on dedicated hardware. This upgrade aims to help developers create more agile edge applications that can respond quicker to user actions and boost developer productivity.
4. EdgeWorkers
Edge computing is a method for delivering data to users near them, based on the theory that visitors connect to Akamai’s global network closest to them geographically — known as the edge — where it can respond faster than if they were accessing it directly.
EdgeWorkers are a set of serverless solutions that developers can write to automate processing at the edge. These could be employed for many purposes, such as delivering content to users, increasing monetization opportunities and more.
To take advantage of EdgeWorkers, customers should configure them as behaviors within Akamai Property Managers. These behaviors can be assigned to URLs, hosts or conditions that cause the EdgeWorkers to execute.
Developers now have access to a free usage tier that allows them to test their applications in EdgeWorkers without incurring an expense. Furthermore, two new resource tiers offer flexibility by enabling users to choose the CPU and memory levels they require at prices they can afford.
Rapid Data Access with EdgeKV: Akamai has introduced an EdgeKV capability that offers low-latency, high-availability access to key-value data at the edge. This includes a JavaScript helper library for simple read, write and update operations as well as role-based access controls to prevent unauthorized entry.
Real-time content protection to prevent piracy: Akamai has implemented scalable forensic watermarking support, preintegrated with leading third-party providers, as well as an Edge Revocation API designed to shut down pirated streams in near real-time. These features enable companies to safeguard their digital assets while keeping up with consumer demand for speedy closure of transactions.
Integration between Macrometa and Akamai: Developers can now utilize Macrometa’s console, SDKs and APIs to easily build their apps with Macrometa’s toolset so they are automatically deployed onto the Edge platform as EdgeWorkers. These apps can run on mobile phones, web browsers, smart TVs and connected cars alike.
Macrometa provides an easy-to-use interface for deployment, monitoring, inspection and troubleshooting applications on Akamai. With its advanced bidirectional devops capabilities, customers are able to create and manage full app lifecycles on Akamai – including continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD). By combining Macrometa’s CI/CD capabilities with Akamai’s edge infrastructure customers can create cloud-native SaaS offerings for global customer bases faster and more efficiently than ever before.
