Akamai Technologies Inc., the content delivery network firm that’s morphing into a cloud infrastructure services provider, today announced the opening of three new cloud data center facilities in Paris, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, with Seattle and Chennai, India, opening later this quarter.

They’re part of its mission to deliver a new kind of cloud that’s designed to meet the needs of modern, distributed applications, with high performance, low latency and global scalability. The new sites were rolled out alongside a range of improvements to Akamai’s cloud infrastructure, with the company launching new premium instance types, greater object storage capacity and a new global load balancer to improve the reliability of the applications it hosts.

Akamai made its name as a content delivery network provider and later expanded into security. More recently, it has made an ambitious move to take on giants such as Amazon Web Services Inc. in the cloud computing business. The company doubled down on its cloud computing plans after acquiring the infrastructure-as-a-service platform provider Linode LLC for about $900 million in February 2022. That was followed by the launch of its Akamai Connected Cloud offering earlier this year.

Akamai’s cloud infrastructure offering piggybacks on its content delivery network to span 4,200 locations across 134 countries, placing compute, storage, database and other essential cloud services closer to large populations, industries and information technology centers. The company claims to offer the most “widely distributed” cloud infrastructure platform in the world, enabling developers to build and deploy more performant workloads with single-digit-millisecond latencies and global reach.

The company is looking to serve customers in areas such as the media, gaming, software-as-a-service, retail and government industries. It’s hoping to attract them not only through the capabilities of Akamai Connected Cloud, but also through aggressive pricing.

According to Akamai, its new cloud infrastructure sites are part of a push to bring compute, storage, database and other services to the underlying backbone that powers its edge computing network. It said it has reimagined conventional data center design principles, using its vast content delivery experience to connect each site to the company’s massive global backbone.

Akamai’s distributed cloud infrastructure. Source: Akamai

Akamai explained that the new sites have been strategically located to bring high-performance, scalable cloud resources to users across its global network. They include a new facility in Washington D.C., close to North Virginia, which is often considered to be the world’s biggest data center hub, containing more than half of the U.S.’s data center inventory. The new site in Chicago enables Akamai customers to access cloud computing services in the fifth-largest data center market in the world, while the Seattle site will give Akamai better access to that region’s growing developer and startup community.

A new site in Paris will enable companies with a European presence to address local data sovereignty requirements, while the coming facility in Chennai, India, will provide access to one of that country’s largest information technology hubs.

Akamai Chief Operating Officer and General Manager Adam Karon said the legacy, centralized cloud architecture built by rivals such as AWS is not suitable for the demands of developers and companies that want to deliver the best possible experience. “These experiences increasingly require putting applications and data closer to the customer,” he said. “Next-generation applications demand cloud infrastructure that provides dramatically lower latency and better egress than what’s currently possible from today’s legacy cloud providers.”

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said today’s announcement shows that Akamai is making good on the promises that followed its acquisition of Linode, offering companies and developers an alternative cloud infrastructure on which to host their applications. “With its new locations and capabilities, Akamai’s offering is beginning to take shape,” Mueller said. “But the challenge it faces now is to convince enterprises and developers that its new cloud infrastructure is more suitable for their next-generation applications.”

Akamai is looking to do that by introducing some new capabilities for its cloud infrastructure. For instance, it said its new premium instances will deliver more consistent performance for applications, with predictable resource and budget allocation. The company guarantees customers assignment to the best-performing processor and hardware combination available for their specific workload. They’re available across each of the three new U.S. sites, and will also be offered in Paris and Chennai, alongside Akamai’s existing shared and dedicated instance offerings.

Customers will also be able to take advantage of Akamai’s announcement that it’s doubling the capacity of its object storage service to 1 petabyte and 1 billion objects per bucket. As a result, customers can access higher data volumes to build better-performing applications and analytics workloads, Akamai said.

Finally, Akamai’s new global load balancer will become available later this summer, the first of several newly integrated services planned to follow its acquisition of Linode. It will enable customers to ensure their applications have no single point of failure, with traffic requests routed to the most optimal data center to minimize latency, the company said.

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