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I think this is Akamai figuring out they need to address the self-serve market. Akamai has 6x the edge network footprint of Cloudflare and has all the cool tre
by dsl 5y ago
I think this is Akamai figuring out they need to address the self-serve market.
Akamai has 6x the edge network footprint of Cloudflare and has all the cool trendy stuff like edge workers, they just suck at selling to the developer.
- napolux 5y agoWorked with Akamai in a company I was working with. That company is so rooted into the 90s that the Spice Girls look fresh and modern. :P
- Thaxll 5y ago"they just suck at selling to the developer." They have all the major compagnies / F500, though so no need to appeal to the HN crowd.
- bloodyplonker22 5y agoYep, that's exactly how large businesses like IBM and HP have failed.
- ForHackernews 5y agoAh yes, the terrible failure of checks notes $116.46 billion market cap. https://companiesmarketcap.com/ibm/marketcap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/ibm/marketcap/
- vel0city 5y agoThey're doing so terrible, only making $5.7B in profit in 2021. I wish I could fail so hard.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoThe best unicorns lose that much money in a year. Profits are for people who don’t “get it”
- cmsj 5y agoprofits are ngmi
- epolanski 5y ago"only"
- duped 5y agoDown 35% over the past ten years, which is terrible
- conductr 5y agoSounds like the market is terrible at pricing
- downrightmike 5y agoYeah, why get in on the next insta before its big...
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agoNot to mention that until they finally had a first-class Terraform provider, their CDN was absolute nightmare to manage at-scale. If you only have a handful of properties then sure, it's fine. You can just point-and-click your way around and make it work. Anything more than that and it was very painful.
- lflux 5y agoHave they gotten faster at applying updates? it would take something like 45 minutes to an hour to make any changes back in 2014, when Fastly was doing sub-minute updates for any CDN changes.
- chairmanwow1 5y agoThey explicitly choose not to sell to the developer. They want big fish customers. This is why I can’t find pricing on their homepage.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoHistorically that's all there was. Random companies didn't need CDNs and associated services. They ran a couple servers in a data-center somewhere and called it good. Not like a website for a company that manufactures dairy processing equipment needs to handle a lot of load. The big corporate customers where who bought that stuff. Then AWS came along. It's a classic case of not seeing the up and coming market because you were winning the existing market.
- recuter 5y agoOne could reasonably conclude that they will start doing this soon under their newly acquired Linode subsidiary.
- wmf 5y agoOr they'll make Linode "call for pricing".
- samtho 5y agoI find this unlikely. It would be a massive waste of capital to have acquired a developer-focused company such as as Linode only to make it, “contact us for pricing.” I think it’s more likely that they will sell the CDN product as another service within Linode.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoThat would be my guess. I will be happy to be wrong.
- salmo 5y agoLinode isn't used by Akamai customers and won't be. It would be a much bigger hurdle for Linode to become enterprise-friendly than for Akamai to become developer-friendly. Akamai is "call for pricing" because they never evolved from an enterprise product. And no "enterprise" just buys off the shelf. They negotiate with a long budget, vendor risk management, legal, etc. process. Its unlikely that many of their contracts are even the same verbiage.
- fomine3 5y agoThey should just expand their services to individual/small business
- stoicjumbotron 5y agoInsane! I wasn't aware Akamai was so huge in scale as compared to Cloudflare.
- dallascrzr 5y agoThat figure is misleading. Every one of Cloudflare’s pops run every service they offer. A large number of Akamai’s are running small CDN only deployments. They also have 20 worldwide ddos scrubbing centers. Cloudflare’s 250 pops all do it. It’s not really apples to apples in terms of scale in the context of footprint
- anaganisk 5y agoI mean Akamai was in the business since 1998 and has been a leading player in CDNs.
- porbelm 5y agoYeah I seem to remember they became well-known when they were the CDN for the Apple Trailers site around the (Sorenson encoded) Episode 1 Trailer times?
- no_wizard 5y agoTheir dev tools and docs need some love. Cloudflare has a smooth DX that Fastly nor Akamai emulate at the moment
- indigodaddy 5y agoAkamai has edge workers?
- mike_d 5y agoThey have had "edge workers" in some form or another for 20 years. Most of the common use cases for things you'd want to do at the edge could be done in their config programming language. Now they have VMs/containers in 15k+ locations.
- cryptonym 5y agoYes You can do most thing with configuration. EdgeWorkers are also available if you want to run your own JS at the Edge https://developer.akamai.com/akamai-edgeworkers-overview https://developer.akamai.com/akamai-edgeworkers-overview
- notyourday 5y ago> Akamai has 6x the edge network footprint of Cloudflare and has all the cool trendy stuff like edge workers, they just suck at selling to the developer. Akamai sucks at selling to everyone. Here's a typical Akamai experience: * An Account Manager (AM) - in a suit - he is going to be the one talking. Not an expert in anything, except maybe Brooks Brothers suits from a few seasons ago. * Account Manager's Lackey (AML) - he is going to be the one with an iPad. His job is to type in the notes of the meeting, typically using a two finger peck method. This of course takes a very long time. So everyone speaks slowly. Sometimes AM would ask AML something about things that are coming or being rolled out using Akamai internal jargon. * Account Manager's Attachment (AMA) - does not really talk, looks uncomfortable. Based on the way AMA is dressed it might be a sales engineer * Every single response to your question would be something that you can either find on the website ( AM, AML and AMA are convinced you cannot read ) which does not actually answer the question or is met with "I will need to loop in the appropriate parties and get you an answer" * Nearly every request that one would presume can be completed programatically is met with "We need to engage professional services for that." which is billed at some insane amount That's experience of paying Akamai millions of dollars a year. Needless to say, spending three years untangling Akamai integration was worth it.