Ion

Deliver fast, engaging, and reliable user experiences on your sites and apps

The intelligent situational performance solution

Achieve superior user experiences across all OSs and devices with delivery, acceleration, and optimization technologies that intelligently make real-time performance decisions. Ion simplifies complexity by seamlessly operating across mixed infrastructures and offloading origin systems. Deliver fast, secure, and highly available performance, backed by Akamai’s SLA.

Consistently delight users, on any device, anywhere

Deliver the best experiences every time

Attract audiences with consistent experiences on all devices and networks, and in all locations.

Engage users with fast, dynamic content

Deliver rich, personalized content while accelerating your sites and apps.

Optimize performance with less cost and effort

Focus on developing new capabilities while relying on automated optimization.

How Ion works

Request

User requests are routed through Akamai Connected Cloud to access the HTML pages they visit.

Delight

Acceleration, prefetching, request and payload reduction, caching, rendering, and front-end optimizations are applied to the pages.

Assess

An asynchronous analysis engine evaluates the existing web property to assess how to further improve front-end optimizations for future requests.

Deliver

No changes to the existing origin content are required, and fast, dynamic content acceleration is provided with low latency and minimal disruptions.

Features

  • Continuously adapt and optimize performance through machine learning analysis of real user data
  • Route around bottlenecks and accelerate dynamic content on any device using network protocols
  • Manage the performance impact from first- and third-party scripts with automated controls
  • Enable development teams to take advantage of serverless compute capabilities at the edge

 

  • Ensure a 100% availability SLA for consistent content access, aligning your brand with service predictability
  • Keep your content fresh and engaging with web-based developer tools

Customer story

Riot Games

“Akamai gets us into places and markets that other providers of similar services don’t quite hit as easily. There’s no doubt we watch our performance stats and Akamai always seem to trend a little bit faster than everybody in all markets that we use them in.”

— McDonald Richards, Team Captain, Riot Games

Ion Use Cases

We’ve shared a few common business cases that Ion can help solve.

Improve user experiences

Improve user experiences

Deliver consistent fast, rich experiences to your users that are optimized for their device, network, operating system, and browser of their choice. Overcome common challenges that deter from omnichannel experiences that users want.

Reduce operational costs

Reduce operational costs

Maximize infrastructure offload and reduce operational costs by leveraging the scalability of Akamai Connected Cloud instead of building out complex delivery optimization methods and regional delivery methods.

Enable your DevOps teams

Enable your DevOps teams

Keep your content fresh and engaging with web-based tools and APIs that simplify operations. Integrate Ion as part of your existing developer workflows with a programmable, automated, and repeatable interface that allows for early testing and validation, monitoring, real-time visibility, and developer-friendly logic at the edge.

Deliver secure experiences

Deliver secure experiences

Ensure your content is delivered securely. Ion has a PCI DSS compliant cloud-based network that has a suite of managed certificates (SAN, Wildcard, EV SAN) and support for customer-uploaded third-party certificates, as well as access control to safeguard your assets with centralized authorization; content access through IP, header, and auth; and regional delivery options.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

The web front end encompasses everything a browser does to stitch together a page, including fetching embedded objects, parsing style sheets, and executing JavaScript. The majority of an end user’s wait time for any given page is spent in the front end, so optimizations to front-end performance specifically have significant benefits for the performance of a website overall.

Ion applies optimizations based on sophisticated analysis of web applications as well as real-time conditions specific to the end user’s environment, such as browser, device type, network speed, and usage of third-party services. Ion will then potentially apply a variety of reduce requests, payload minimizations, and rendering accelerations to improve user experience.

The amount of performance benefit that Ion can deliver will vary from site to site, page to page, and even based on which browser or device is being used to make the request. This is why Akamai recommends a layered approach to performance, consisting of acceleration, prefetching, request reduction, payload reduction, and rendering optimizations. It is also why having a single vendor providing these optimizations is beneficial since the integration between these technologies is already included and supported.

Yes, Ion can help execution of third-party services and content by modifying the sequence and order of execution to help avoid a negative impact of poorly performing third parties. This is typically accomplished through the use of asynchronous JavaScript calls and by deferring JavaScript execution until after the onload event to help mitigate negative effects of third parties on the user experience.

Ion has a feature called Adaptive Image Compression that offers the ability to vary the level of compression for JPEG images delivered to mobile devices based on real-time network conditions, allowing mobile pages to load much faster even when network conditions are poor. Adaptive Image Compression provides configuration options to decide how and when to deliver a version of an image with greater compression to reduce the amount of associated data, and help improve mobile performance. Conversely, Adaptive Image Compression will serve up a less compressed image when the network conditions are sufficient. The result is an optimized and improved mobile experience that is intelligently responsive to real-time network conditions.

Due to the nature of mobile networks, Ion can have a significant performance benefit for mobile delivery. The so-called “last mile” associated with mobile networks is often prone to network latency and packet loss, forcing data retransmission and decreased responsiveness — all of which adversely affects user experience. The fewer protocol back-and-forth data negotiations, and the smaller the data payloads, the greater the performance benefit to mobile users. Since Ion is specifically built to provide these benefits, it is extremely well suited for these use cases.

You can choose to integrate Ion with Akamai mPulse real user monitoring (RUM) to help measure specific Ion performance optimizations. mPulse collects performance information from end-user browsers as they load your website. Real user monitoring, also known as end-user experience monitoring or actual experience monitoring, is a passive web monitoring technology that records user interaction with a website. Monitoring actual user interaction with a website is important to website operators to determine if users are being served quickly and without errors — and if they are not, which part of a business process is impacting experience.

Ion has a feature called Device Characterization that allows organizations to make real-time decisions about the specific web experience delivered to a site visitor, based on the capabilities of that end user’s device. Using information derived from the browser’s user agent, Akamai Connected Cloud is able to decipher many characteristics of the requesting device, such as screen size, GPS for location-based services, JavaScript support, and many more. These characteristics are then made available as part of the user request, allowing companies to make intelligent decisions regarding how to respond to a particular request. Importantly, specific caching rules based on various device characteristics can be used to make more of your infrastructure available at the edge, where it is most useful to mobile users. The page that is delivered to each category of device can be unique, providing both improved user experience and reduced page weight, which can help reduce the time needed to deliver the page.

Resources

Ion Technical Documentation

Quickly and easily learn how to get started with Ion.

Akamai 103 Early Hints Prototype: The Results Are In

Learn how Akamai has implemented 103 Early Hints to help you improve user experience and SEO ranking for your websites.

Deliver Fast, Reliable, and Secure Web Experiences with HTTP/3

HTTP/3 is now available to all Akamai content delivery customers — for faster, more reliable, and more secure web experiences.

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