Photo by Vardan Papikyan from Unsplash

Akamai Linode acquisition – the cloud to edge story is getting real!

Akamai announced intent to acquire cloud hosting company Linode in a $900M deal on February 15 2022.  So, the cloud to edge story is getting real and distributed apps (increasingly containerized) are becoming real as well.

This should be welcome news for the cloud industry for the following reasons

  • Akamai now combines its CDN and edge capabilities with cloud hosting capabilities from Linode. Akamai now offers a strong alternative in the Public Cloud space, which has been an oligopoly of 5-6 providers
  • Hybrid and edge computing is expected to increase in the next few years. This acquisition is also significant since Public Cloud vendors have been building out edge capabilities and challenging the likes of Akamai. So this offers customers a new choice from cloud to edge

Customers are always better off when they have a choice.

It puts a spotlight on the many smaller hosting and datacenter providers who have been building out new locations and capabilities and can perhaps offer better price points to customers. Customers do see value in them, but don’t see the parity with larger cloud providers as they lack a complete cloud to edge story and similar technology capabilities.

It is also not easy for most customers to leverage multi-provider environments, as the capabilities and experience will not have parity and becomes a challenge to manage such heterogeneous environments. However, customers realize very well they don’t want to be tethered to single vendor environments.

fledge.io has been created to homogenize and unify the application infrastructure management experience across different providers and locations. Our value is to enable customers to pick and choose best-of-breed cloud and edge infrastructure, and enable them to manage their apps cohesively across environments – without any lock-in. We have demonstrated to customers that we can enable them to manage applications across cloud and even small edge devices (the size of a Raspberry Pi) identically.

Read A hitchhiker’s guide to hybrid, multi cloud and edge blog to see how we do it.

Reach out to us at info@fledge.io to schedule a demo to see how we can help your application infrastructure needs.

Pramodh Mallipatna
Founder and CEO
fledge.io

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