Akamai announced the availability of Cloudlets, extensions to Akamai solutions that are designed to speed up time to market for developers and offload infrastructure demand.
Cloudlets allow customers to do more with the Akamai Intelligent Platform, in a way that is self-serviceable, alleviating the need for further infrastructure investment or the development of custom tooling.
Incorporating "click to buy" and "click to provision and configure" deployment, Akamai claims that Cloudlets can offer faster time to market for advanced functionality while reducing development, infrastructure, and maintenance costs.
The Cloudlets are being introduced with the availability of Edge Redirector, Visitor Prioritization and Image Converter. The company plans to continue to introduce new Cloudlets regularly, ultimately forming a marketplace of extensions where customers can choose which capabilities are best suited to them.
VP of the web experience unit at Akamai, Ravi Maira, said: "Akamai is well known for our solutions that help our customers make their web experiences fast, reliable and secure. With the introduction of Cloudlets, we continue to extend the value our platform provides to our customers via a new set of capabilities that are designed to provide a positive impact on the overall user experience.
"As important, we are giving our customers these capabilities in a self-service manner that is easy, convenient and as cost effective to deploy as possible."
El Al, an Israeli airline operator, has been an early adopter of the Cloudlets. The firm’s web coordinator said: "We had an immediate need to set up 5,000 redirects to preserve link equity for SEO, due to our website restructuring. When initially looking for a solution, it appeared there was going to be no easy and flexible way for us to address our needs. Edge Redirector was a perfect solution, which helped us to easily manage this large number of URL redirects and avoid the cost associated with a custom solution."
Cloudlets are available to Akamai customers now and can be accessed, trialed, purchased, and deployed through the Luna Control Center.
