The developer-focused cloud computing firm Akamai Technologies Inc. has announced ambitious plans to embed a range of cloud computing services within its sprawling edge content delivery network.

Announced today, Akamai’s Generalized Edge Compute or Gecko initiative is about helping companies deliver better experiences by moving their workloads closer to end users. The launch of Gecko is another step toward the company’s vision of creating an alternative kind of cloud platform that meets the needs of high-performance applications, with lower latencies and global scalability.

Akamai argues that the traditional cloud computing architectures built by companies like Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud were never designed for this. By leveraging its edge network, Akamai says, Gecko will provide a way for companies to move their heaviest compute workloads to the edge of its network. Such workloads have historically always been consigned to centralized data centers, but can now be hosted in hundreds of previously out of reach locations, bringing them closer to more end users, the company said.

In early trials of the Gecko edge architecture, customers have demonstrated that applications such as artificial intelligence inference, multiplayer gaming, and social and streaming media are ideally suited to take advantage of its closer proximity to end users. Akamai has also identified up and coming use cases, such as immersive retail experiences, spatial computing and consumer and industrial internet of things applications as being suitable for edge distribution.

One advantage of Akamai’s edge network is that traditional cloud platforms treat cloud and edge networks separately. But with Gecko, Akamai is able to deploy generalized compute capabilities atop of its existing edge network, taking advantage of its existing tools, processes and observability systems to ensure a consistent experience from the cloud to the edge. In this way, it can support heavy workloads with full-stacking compute at hundreds of previously hard-to-reach locations.

Akamai’s edge network is one of the biggest in the world, due to the company’s status as one of the world’s leading content delivery network providers. Despite being a leader in CDN, it has ambitions to disrupt the cloud computing landscape too, taking on the likes of AWS. Its plans resulted from its $900 million acquisition of the developer cloud infrastructure-as-a-service provider Linode LLC in early 2022.

Following that acquisition, Akamai launched its Connected Cloud platform last year. Its cloud infrastructure piggybacks on its CDN to span an impressive 4,200 locations in 134 countries, putting essential cloud resources such as compute, storage, databases and more, closer to users in virtually every region in the world. That’s why Akamai claims to be the most widely distributed cloud infrastructure platform of all, providing global reach and single-digit-millisecond latencies for high-performance workloads.

The scale of Akamai’s Gecko initiative will mean that developers no longer have to consider the limitations of their cloud platforms when building low-latency applications designed to be deployed at the edge, the company said.

Akamai says it expects to see big demand for Gecko, citing a 2023 study by ClearPath Strategies that found two-thirds of information technology decision-makers will increase their use of distributed cloud services in the next 12 months. A third of those respondents added that they consider the benefits of distributed cloud, such as the ability to process data at the edge, where it is created, to be mission-critical.

Akamai co-founder and Chief Executive Tom Leighton said Gecko is the most exciting development in the cloud in the last decade, representing the next phase of the company’s roadmap to build a more connected cloud platform for enterprises. “We began delivering on that roadmap with the launch of Akamai Connected Cloud and the rapid rollout of new core compute regions around the world,” Leighton said. “With Gecko, we’re furthering that vision by combining the computing power of our cloud platform with the proximity and efficiency of the edge, to put workloads closer to users than any other cloud provider. When we say we operate at planetary scale, this is what we mean.”

International Data Corp. analyst Dave McCarthy said Akamai is delivering on the promise it made when it first acquired Linode, integrating essential compute capabilities with its security and content delivery services. “What it’s doing now with Gecko is an example of the more distributed cloud world we’re heading towards, driven by enterprise demands to put compute and data closer to the edge,” he said.

There will be three steps to the rollout of Akamai Gecko, with phase one being to embed compute with support for virtual machines in 100 cities by the end of the year. So far, the company has already deployed Gecko-architected regions in underserved locations such as Hong Kong; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Queretaro, Mexico; Johannesburg, South Africa; Bogota, Colombia; Denver, Colorado; Houston, Texas; Hamburg, Germany; and Marseille, France. Ultimately, Akamai intends to expand Gecko to hundreds of global cities in the coming years.

Phase two of Gecko is expected to kick off later this year, when Akamai adds support for application containers in those regions. Finally, phase three will see Gecko regions add support for automated workload orchestration, paving the way for developers to deploy high-performance applications across hundreds of distributed locations, with a consistent user experience in each one.

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