Akamai Boosts Edge Application Power, Expanding Possibilities For Developers

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM), the world’s most trusted solution for protecting and delivering digital experiences, today announces powerful enhancements designed to enable Akamai customers to create and deliver even more exceptional user experiences at the edge.

Since its introduction, Akamai’s EdgeWorkers serverless edge compute solution has empowered developers to build and deliver digital experiences from Akamai’s platform of unparalleled scale, worldwide. With the latest release, Akamai gives developers even richer capabilities and greater control at the edge.

New Akamai edge platform enhancements include:

More flexibility for EdgeWorkers, making it even easier for developers to deploy code at the edge. New resource tiers offer developers a choice by packaging CPU and memory, along with commensurate pricing options, to best fit their needs. The tiers consist of Basic Compute for applications requiring lower CPU and memory consumption, and Dynamic Compute for those applications demanding higher levels.

EdgeKV provides high-availability, low-latency access to data for custom code at the edge. EdgeKV is a globally distributed key-value store that simplifies and accelerates database functions for edge applications. There is no complex query language, and it supports a wide range of data types. As an example, a sports and entertainment company has implemented EdgeKV with EdgeWorkers to perform complex geolocation calculations. The capability maps users’ longitude and latitude coordinates in relation to state borders, helping to ensure compliance of their service with local laws.

Both EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV offer a free pricing tier that enables the full feature list of the product and includes a total of 60 million free events (30 million per product) per month.

API Acceleration, Akamai’s newest delivery offering specifically optimized for API traffic, provides increased reliability and performance at scale. As API-intensive applications have become increasingly popular, API traffic has exploded. In 2020, Akamai delivered more than 300 trillion API requests — a 53% year-over-year increase. API acceleration uses special-purpose hardware, reserved capacity, and prioritized routing to help ensure API transactions are completed successfully.

“Since introducing EdgeWorkers, we have been inspired by the creative ways customers are using the Akamai Intelligent Edge to deliver amazing user experiences. With this latest platform release, we hope to accelerate this innovation by giving developers the ability to build truly transformative applications at the edge,” said Lelah Manz, senior vice president, Edge Technology Group, Akamai. “We know that we’re just scratching the surface and can’t wait to see what new ideas take shape using EdgeWorkers and the Akamai platform.”

For more information about EdgeWorkers and to take advantage of the free evaluation tier, please visit the EdgeWorkers Developer site.