Akamai Technologies has launched a managed container service from its various Edge locations.
The cloud and cybersecurity company announced this week that it would be offering managed container services for companies seeking to run their workloads closer to users, devices, and sources of data.
The offering will be available from the 700-plus cities where Akamai has servers located including more than 4,300 points of presence.
The company is currently testing the offering with customer applications in more than 100 locations.
The service will enable customers to run workloads using Akamai's full-stack cloud computing infrastructure including GPUs and VPUs, object storage, managed database service, and network services from locations closer to end users.
"Our new Managed Container Service leverages the entirety of Akamai's global presence, which means customers can take advantage of Akamai's 700-plus cities to run and scale their workloads," said Adam Karon, Akamai COO and GM of its cloud technology group. "As with other services on Akamai Cloud, businesses can maintain predictable costs as their applications scale. This is a critical capability as we strive to become a key platform in enterprise multi-cloud environments."
Akamai first teased its managed container service during its recent Q4 2024 earnings call earlier this month, with CEO Tom Leighton noting: "We expanded Akamai’s core data center footprint to 41 locations in 36 cities around the world [in the last year]. Next week, we plan to announce that we’ve enabled our new managed container service in our 4,300-plus points of presence in more than 700 cities around the world. We’re currently testing this service with customer workloads in over 100 cities."
Leighton also noted that, with the managed container service, Akamai is now doing "head-to-head trials against the hyperscalers for a lot of applications" and finding that it performs better at a lower price point.
"With the managed container service, that’s super exciting," he said. "We can actually support our customers’ containers in hundreds of cities. Nobody is doing that today. And so again — and those are the locations we’ve had already for the delivery business and the security business. So we’re already there. So you get better performance and scalability at a lower price point."
The company had a revenue of $1.02 billion for the quarter, up three percent year-over-year (YoY), of which it said 69 percent came from security and compute. Full-year revenue was $3.991bn, up five percent YoY, of which security and compute was 67 percent, growing 18 percent YoY.
