Akamai and Linode: Giving Developers One Place to Build, Run, and Secure Apps
I am incredibly excited to announce that today we have completed the acquisition of Linode. You may have seen our press release announcing the acquisition, or listened to our earnings call during which our executives discussed why this is the right strategic investment for Akamai. But I wanted to use this opportunity to highlight why, as a technologist, this is such an important step forward for both Akamai and Linode, and what you can expect to see from us in the future.
We believe that empowering developers is key to fulfilling our mission to power and protect life online. After all, they are building the apps that shape life online as we know it — how we work, play, communicate, give and receive care, learn, and engage in virtual worlds. That’s why in recent years, we’ve been investing in putting the power of the Akamai Intelligent Edge in the hands of developers so they can not only deliver and secure applications on our platform, but also build on Akamai.
Our serverless solution, EdgeWorkers, has been a positive step in this direction, opening up our platform to deliver compute capabilities at the edge. But to truly empower developers, we believed we needed to move beyond this single layer of compute and focus on creating a platform that offers a continuum of compute to develop applications from the cloud to the edge.
With our success delivering large-scale computing solutions, such as the distributed compute solution powering iCloud Private Relay, we wanted to move beyond custom solutions to build a scalable multi-tenant computing platform. We needed a way to offer simple, flexible, and effective compute at scale. And that led us to Linode.
Making cloud computing simple, accessible, and affordable to all
For two decades, Linode has been laser-focused on making cloud computing simple, accessible, and affordable to all. Today, their world-class compute platform empowers more than a million developers who have voted Linode the leading infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution in the market for being easy to engage with, easy to set up, and easy to use. Linode is also incredibly easy to integrate into a business’s application architecture because of its price-to-performance, and consistent, predictable fee structure. From creating an account to deploying and running your first app, the process is simple, straightforward, and seamless.
Linode is a team of passionate technologists with an unparalleled depth of knowledge and expertise in compute, storage, and cloud architectures. More importantly, they are focused on customer success as a key way to measure their business success. Linode has developed a great recipe for engaging and providing value to their customers, and Linode’s customers can expect more of the same from Akamai. Together we will continue to provide simple, affordable, and accessible compute solutions that developers want to use.
Building the world’s most distributed compute platform — from cloud to edge
We intend to invest in scaling Linode’s existing system by leveraging our global platform. We plan to scale Linode across hundreds of data centers to tens of thousands of servers across the globe. We’ve already begun to plan how we will develop and launch new products and services that developers need, including lightweight versions of some of Akamai’s existing products.
There are a number of goals we will aim to achieve together, but my personal gauge of success will be this: When a developer has an idea for their next great app, they can log into Linode and access all of the technology and tools they need to build, deploy, and secure their code instantly to locations around the world with the same simplicity, accessibility, and ease of use that exists today.
