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Cloudlets

Enhance your web experiences effortlessly with robust, self-serviceable apps

Manage Complexity with App Logic at the Edge of Akamai Connected Cloud

Cloudlets are like value-added apps. They are extensions to your Akamai delivery solutions that add discrete functionality to solve specific business or operational challenges. Cloudlets bring your business logic closer to the end user by being executed at the edge of Akamai Connected Cloud and let you use what you need from the platform based on your own web experiences. Cloudlets can be self-provisioned and self-configured and they have an easy-to-use user interface and API suite. Akamai offers 11 different cloudlets that perform a variety of operations, including load balancing, API prioritization, audience segmentation, and more.

Provision

Provision

Each cloudlet is purchased individually through the Akamai Marketplace and provisioned in Property Manager.

Configure

Configure

Cloudlets are designed and configured through an easy-to-use interface or via the included cloudlets API.

Enable

Enable

User requests are routed to an optimal edge server that fetches the created policies, executes metadata logic, and returns a response.

Manage

Manage

Different permission levels allow custom policies and policy versions to be easily managed.

Have greater impact on users’ digital experiences

Run application logic at the edge

Execute application logic closer to end users for common use cases like load balancing.

Get greater scale and offload

Provide a branded waiting room or offload processing from redirects and URL rewrites.

Achieve granular traffic control

Load balance apps, control traffic migration, and segment traffic based on policy.

Enhance user experiences for common use cases


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

The following cloudlets are available from Akamai:

  • API Prioritization: Lets you specify which calls for applications resources like JSON or XML have priority and are sent to the origin during high-demand situations.
  • App Load Balancer: Offers intelligent, scalable traffic management across physical, virtual, and cloud-hosted origins without having to send load feedback. It can automatically detect load conditions and route traffic to the optimal data source while maintaining custom routing policies and consistent visitor session behavior.
  • Audience Segmentation: Provides hassle-free traffic segmentation and stickiness without degrading performance, which is often beneficial for A/B and multivariate testing. This cloudlet creates stable test populations at the ​Akamai​ edge by assigning a cookie value to the user.
  • Edge Redirector: Helps IT and marketing users manage large numbers of redirects more efficiently. By executing redirects at the ​Akamai​ edge, you can reduce round trips to the origin and offload hits from your origin infrastructure.
  • Forward Rewrite: Helps you create, based on in-bound request information, human-readable and search engine optimization–friendly (SEO-friendly) URLs for dynamically generated pages.
  • Input Validation: Helps strengthen your web forms against abuse or monopolization from brute force and behavioral attackers. It does this by validating form fields and values in incoming requests. In addition, this cloudlet provides the ability to limit the number of valid form submissions and invalid attempts per user. Once the limit is reached, additional requests are denied (403) or redirected (302) to a custom "penalty box."
  • Phased Release: Helps facilitate the rollout of code changes to production. With this cloudlet, you can move a percentage of visitors to the new experience or deployment while also retaining the flexibility to roll back immediately should you encounter challenges.
  • Request Control: Lets you provide conditional access to your website or application by defining and managing allow lists and deny lists based on the IP and geography associated with incoming requests.
  • Virtual Waiting Room: Helps maintain business continuity for your dynamic applications in high-demand situations by placing visitors in a virtual waiting room when your origin reaches its configured capacity limit. It acts as a front-end “shock absorber” when peak traffic volumes require the origin for transaction processing, such as shopping cart checkouts, donation pages, service/application subscriptions, and form registrations. 
  • Visitor Prioritization: Uses probability- and percentage-based prioritization for entry into the waiting room and origin. The Virtual Waiting Room and Visitor Prioritization comparison provides the differences between these two cloudlets so that you can select the waiting room cloudlet that best meets your business requirements.

You can associate a cloudlet policy and all its versions with either a single property or multiple properties.

Cloudlets enable you to provide different levels of access to your configurations for each use. Each cloudlet has permission settings for viewers, editors, and administrators. Some cloudlets offer custom permissions.

Products that work well with Cloudlets

Ion

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

API Acceleration

Improve the performance and reliability of your APIs at scale.

Adaptive Media Delivery

Deliver consistent, high-quality online video securely at massive scale.

Quote Industry details

With Akamai, we’ve seen a marked improvement in site performance — and that enables us to better compete in an industry where speed of delivery is crucial.

Shailendra Kalelkar, Digital Business Head, Business Standard

Cloudlets Use Cases

Here are some of the common challenges that Cloudlets can help you solve.

Improve User Experiences

Improve User Experiences

Akamai offers several cloudlets that can help you further improve user experiences with your Akamai solutions. Visitor Prioritization and Virtual Waiting Room cloudlets allow you to create specific journeys for visitors in times of peak or overload traffic conditions; the API Prioritization cloudlet allows you to choose to serve the API traffic to some segments while serving an alternate static experience from Akamai NetStorage to other segments; and the Forward Rewrite cloudlet enables you to offer clean or semantic URLs by rewriting requests at the Akamai edge.

Increase Control and Reduce Costs

Increase Control and Reduce Costs

You can get more control over your site/applications that use Akamai solutions by using the many cloudets available. App Load Balancer allows you to achieve high levels of availability and efficiently scale your cloud and physical infrastructure while customizing routing rules and control session behavior for your web application traffic; Request Control enables you to offload unqualified traffic from your origin and provide conditional visitor access by controlling which requests your site responds to at the edge; and Phased Release is designed to help facilitate the rollout of code changes to production with fast rollback capabilities.

Offload Business Logic to the Edge

Offload Business Logic to the Edge

You can easily solve these important challenges by offloading business logic to the edge with pre-built apps on Akamai Connected Cloud that are equipped with a policy manager you can control yourself, while avoiding the cost of custom development, maintenance costs, and additional infrastructure.

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