A New Way to Manage Property Configurations: Dynamic Rule Updates
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As of March 31, 2025, Dynamic Rule Updates has been rolled out worldwide and is now generally available to all Akamai customers.
This update to Akamai’s Property Manager tool introduces a new way to manage property configurations that is backward-compatible and versionless. As a result, customers can stay up-to-date with the latest platform features without the hassle of manual version management or the fear of breaking changes.
What is Dynamic Rule Updates?
Dynamic Rule Updates is an enhancement to Akamai’s Property Manager API (PAPI) that eliminates the need for manual rule format versioning. In the past, when Akamai updated the catalog of behaviors and criteria (for example, by adding new features or deprecating old ones), customers often had to increment configuration versions or "freeze" rule formats to avoid disruptions.
With Dynamic Rule Updates, the system automatically handles these changes behind the scenes. Your property’s rules always use the “latest” format, and PAPI will accept and convert older rule inputs to the newest format seamlessly. In short, you no longer need to manage version numbers for your property configurations — PAPI ensures your configs remain compatible and up-to-date automatically.
Why this change matters
Dynamic Rule Updates brings several key benefits that customer-facing teams should understand, including backward-compatibility, ease of use and time savings, automatic access to the most up-to-date versions, and seamless updates.
Backward compatibility
Your existing configurations won’t break when new behaviors or updates are introduced. PAPI will accept previous rule definitions and automatically upgrade them to the latest format — so, even if the underlying catalog changes, the API keeps things running smoothly.
This means no more sudden validation errors due to platform updates — everything remains compatible by default.
Ease of use and time savings
Managing property versions becomes much easier. There’s no need to manually track or update rule format versions every time Akamai releases enhancements. This reduction in complexity saves time and effort for customers and service teams alike.
Configuration changes can be made without worrying about underlying version mismatches or toggling special flags — the system handles it automatically.
Automatic access to the most up-to-date versions
Customers can effortlessly take advantage of the newest Akamai features and improvements. The latest rule format always includes the most up-to-date versions of behaviors and criteria, so configurations automatically have access to new capabilities as they roll out.
New options are added with safe default settings, so customers can choose to use them whenever they’re ready. There’s no lag in availability — everyone stays on the current feature by default.
Seamless updates (no downtime or reversions)
Because PAPI handles changes dynamically, they are dealt with transparently. For example, if a feature is renamed, PAPI will still recognize the old name and map it to the new one behind the scenes. If a feature is retired, PAPI will ignore that setting if it’s sent in the config. This ensures ongoing stability — even as Akamai updates its platform, customers’ rule configurations continue to work without intervention.
This keeps customers on the latest platform without added work or risk, simplifying property management and ensuring a better experience all around.
Dynamic Rule Updates FAQs
Almost everyone. Customers who maintain their Akamai configurations can now do so more easily. If you are not using Property Manager's latest rule format, you should consider using the versionless approach. This will simplify your workflow since you no longer need to freeze rule versions or worry about adopting new features — they’re always current.
If your configurations use “includes” (shared rule trees referenced by multiple properties), proceed with caution. These configurations should continue using frozen (version-locked) rule formats for now. The dynamic latest format is not yet supported for properties that use includes, because an include and its parent property must use the same rule format version.
In practical terms, this means a property that pulls in includes cannot switch fully to the new versionless system until those includes are also migrated or the dependency is removed. So, for any customer that is heavily using includes, it’s best to hold off on enabling Dynamic Rule Updates (keep using the previous versioned approach) until a migration path is available for their includes.
For customers currently using a frozen rule format (perhaps they locked to an older catalog version to avoid changes), there is a path to migrate to the latest format once they’re ready to do so. This is a one-time procedure that involves retrieving their config with a special request and then saving it back in the new format.
The detailed migration steps are provided in our documentation. In essence, when a customer wants to convert from a pinned version to versionless, it can be done without rebuilding their configuration from scratch. Encourage customers to consider this migration to enjoy the benefits of Dynamic Rule Updates, but only if they are not hindered by includes as noted above.
Additional resources
For more information, please refer to the official documentation and release notes on this feature.
Release notes — Dynamic Rule Updates (March 31, 2025): Detailed notes on this general availability release
Dynamic Rule Updates documentation: Technical documentation explaining the versionless rule format and how PAPI handles rule updates