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Akamai’s cloud delivery platform offers an extraordinary range of capabilities designed to supercharge any website, web application, or mobile app. Akamai’s ever-growing suite of powerful APIs offers developers fine-grained control and the ability to scale to meet any business need. Akamai for DevOps makes it seamless and easy for developers to incorporate powerful cloud tools and technologies directly into existing CI/CD workflows for maximum speed and efficiency in the software development lifecycle.
Over the past few years there has been a “shift left” from IT operations to the developers. Now the responsibility of delivering a superior and differentiated Customer Experience (CX) also falls on the developers. Developers are tasked with iterating quickly and releasing new products and features to the market faster than ever before. This shift left is is powered by DevOps.
In light of this, Akamai has transformed its cloud delivery platform making it easier than ever to integrate seamlessly into the CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) workflow. The three pillars of Akamai for DevOps are:
Akamai Command Line Interface (CLI)
The Property Manager API and Variables can be managed via the command line with simple invocations inside of the open-source Akamai CLI, which serves as a wrapper around our APIs to simplify how you use them. For example you can use the CLI tool within your automation scripts to simplify the process of creating a property - the CLI ensures that all of the complexities that go with creating a new property are completely abstracted from the user, freeing up valuable DevOps resources for other activities.
Download the CLI and read the documentation here.
API Protection
Kona Site Defender (KSD) uses positive and negative security models to protect APIs from malicious calls. Developers can define what types of requests and calls are allowed, and KSD will inspect the parameters of RESTful APIs against a whitelist of expected values, and inspect JSON body and path parameters for risky content. Rate controls can be used to mitigate DDoS attacks launched via APIs, and Kona Site Defender includes analytics and reporting at an API level.
Fast Metadata Activation
Allows you to publish configuration changes in minutes on production and on staging enabling devs to make, test, and deploy changes multiple times a day.
Fast Purge
You can use “hold-till-told” methodology caching long TTLs, and refresh quickly via the API. Or use the UI to make rapid fixes to published content.
APIs
Akamai offers APIs for everything, enabling you to perform content delivery tasks programmatically via the command line. Some of the examples are:
CloudTest
The ability for developers to perform CI testing against a production environment is critical to bringing new applications to market. The cost of fixing code defects increases exponentially as you move from left to right in the application development lifecycle. Bug fixes earlier towards the left of the application lifecycle and always a much cheaper fix, while fixes made in production are always the most expensive. With Akamai you can perform load testing at scale in an pre-production environment, so you know your app will scale in production. CloudTest capabilities include web and mobile apps, APIs, databases, and web services, testing fits seamlessly into your CI workflow. During testing; you always have access to real-time analytics, and customizable dashboards allowing for root-cause analysis while tests run.
End to End Testing
The ability for developers to perform CI testing against a production environment is critical to bringing new applications to market. The cost of fixing code defects increases exponentially as you move from left to right in the application development lifecycle. Bug fixes earlier towards the left of the application lifecycle and always a much cheaper fix, while fixes made in production are always the most expensive. With Akamai you can perform load testing at scale in an pre-production environment. Testing capabilities include web and mobile apps, APIs, databases, and web services, these fit into your continuous integration workflow. During testing; you always have access to real-time analytics, and customizable dashboards allowing for root-cause analysis while tests run.
Out-of-the-box integrations for third party tools
mPulse
Collect data directly from a user’s browser or mobile application in real time, capturing performance metrics such as bandwidth and page load times, as well as engagement metrics like bounce, and conversion rates. mPulse also gathers mobile user metrics like user location, device type, carrier speed and application usage to complete the total perspective.
Security & Event Management (SIEM
With SIEM Integration, you can capture security events generated on the Akamai platform in your SIEM application. Kona Site Defender customers can now use out-of-the-box connectors for Splunk and CEF Syslog. For customers with other SIEMs, they can use the SIEM API to capture security events generated on the Akamai platform.
DataStream
DataStream delivers real-time middle-mile visibility through customized data logs and aggregated metrics on CDN performance, errors and events, via Push and Pull APIs.
Edge Side Includes (ESI)
Enable users to deploy apps once and choose where the app should be assembled: on the Content Management System (CMS), or the Application Server (AS), or on the Content Delivery Network (CDN). ESI can also be used to coalesce multiple API calls at the Edge and API calls that are associated with different functions of an app into a single API call, resulting in lower API traffic and improved performance. Akamai was one of the pioneers of open-source ESI efforts, and now the ESI open-standard spec is being maintained along with other tech companies like IBM, Oracle, BEA Systems, etc.
Cloudlets
Are smart, scalable apps at the Akamai Edge that provide out-of-the-box functionality at The Edge:
Cloudlets effectively let you leverage Akamai’s intelligent platform to extend your DevOps capabilities to The Edge.
SDKs
With our SDKs, developers can easily add new capabilities to their apps. Akamai’s Mobile Application Performance (MAP) SDK helps you understand the causes of mobile application latency and then give you the data you need to optimize and accelerate your app’s API and image requests over Akamai’s Intelligent Platform. The Predictive Content Delivery SDK gives you the ability to intelligently cache videos on a user’s device. Using the SDK you can efficiently download and manage content on the device, and then configure, control, and monitor it through the dashboard. Then personalize videos based on user preferences, usage data, and social activity. Media Acceleration SDK bit rate, throughput, and steady connectivity. High end - higher bit rates, for longer. Low end, mobile users on lossy or unmanaged wifi connectivity higher renditions / bitrates. Using a standards-based client to server protocol that leverages Google’s QUIC.
