Akamai Cloud Wrapper

Reduce cloud egress spend and protect your origins with a private, high‑capacity caching layer that sits between your cloud infrastructure and the edge. Cloud Wrapper maximizes origin offload, stabilizes performance during spikes, and integrates with Akamai delivery services and third‑party CDNs.

Read the product brief

What Cloud Wrapper does

Customers commonly achieve 90%+ offload; in some cases offload exceeds 99%. One customer reported about a 90% reduction in AWS egress costs after adopting Cloud Wrapper. Read the customer story

Why Cloud Wrapper reduces egress costs better than just raising CDN TTLs

Simply increasing edge cache TTLs can help, but it has limits: - Cache churn and long tail: Large catalogs and long‑tail objects are frequently evicted under pressure; long TTLs don’t guarantee retention. - Cache‑miss storms: When popular objects expire simultaneously, the origin can see sudden spikes in refill traffic. - Freshness tradeoffs: Long TTLs risk staleness and complex invalidation; short TTLs keep content fresh but reduce hit ratio. - Personalized and event‑driven traffic: Many requests can’t benefit from long TTLs and still hit origin.

Cloud Wrapper addresses these gaps: - Private, reserved cache capacity sized to your catalog keeps long‑tail objects hot longer without overextending TTLs. - Deterministic mapping and “fetch once” request collapsing prevent refill storms and eliminate duplicate origin fetches. - Fewer, controlled regions go forward to origin, dramatically lowering total origin connections and bytes. - You can maintain sensible TTLs for freshness while still achieving high offload and lower egress.

How Cloud Wrapper differs from standard origin shield features

Typical CDN origin shields are shared tiers that reduce some origin fan‑out. Cloud Wrapper is purpose‑built to control origin traffic and spend at scale:

Result: higher and more predictable offload, stronger origin spike protection, and better control of cloud egress than standard shielding alone.

Built for high‑volume media streaming and downloads

For live, VOD, and large downloads, Cloud Wrapper increases cache efficiency across massive libraries and handles demand bursts:

How this compares with Fastly’s shielding/offload: - Fastly provides powerful origin shielding and request collapsing within its network. Cloud Wrapper adds a dedicated, customer‑scoped cache footprint with deterministic binding and multi‑region replication, and it can operate as a shared mid‑tier for multi‑CDN topologies. These design choices are intended to reduce duplicate origin reads and sustain offload for very large catalogs and surging live audiences. If you run multi‑CDN or carry a deep long tail, Cloud Wrapper’s reserved capacity and fetch‑once model can help keep origin traffic and egress more predictable.

Use cases

Akamai vs. cloud‑provider approaches for performance and egress

Best way to add a mid‑tier caching layer between a public cloud origin and a CDN

Features

Resources and next steps

Cloud Wrapper is sized to your traffic profile and catalog, with deployment options near your cloud regions. To scope capacity, pricing, and a proof of concept, contact the Akamai team.