Akamai adds new capabilities and tools for developers

Content delivery platform provider Akamai announced Tuesday new enhancements to its EdgeWorkers serverless edge compute solution designed to give developers more capabilities and greater control.

New Akamai edge platform enhancements include:

Simplified edge development and more flexibility to deploy code
The new EdgeKV database that provides high-availability, low-latency access to data for custom code
API Acceleration, a new delivery vehicle optimized for API traffic with increased reliability and performance to handle traffic spikes

The increased flexibility to deploy code comes from new debug headers that aid in troubleshooting and deployment, said C.J. Arnesen, Akamai's Edge product marketing manager. Two new resource tiers also give developers a choice by packaging CPU and memory, along with different pricing options, to best fit their needs, the company said.

"These are two levels of pricing to help developers more cost effectively scale their code," Arenesen said. "[For] example, a simple redirect only needs basic compute while a more complex EdgeWorker [microservice] that performs personalization via dynamic content assembly would need greater memory and CPU time thresholds and benefit from our dynamic tier."

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The first of the two tiers, Basic Compute, is used for applications requiring lower CPU and memory consumption. The second offering, Dynamic Compute, is used by applications demanding higher levels of CPU and memory. Each tier includes free usage of up to 30 million events per month. Events are the individual functions an EdgeWorker runs, Arnesen said. Depending on the complexity of logic and the code, a request might trigger one event or up to four. According to Akamai's website, "EdgeWorkers enables developers to create and deploy microservices across more than a quarter of a million edge servers deployed around the globe."

It's new API Acceleration offering is specifically optimized for API traffic to provide increased reliability and performance at scale, the company said.

"As API-intensive applications become increasingly popular, API traffic is exploding," Akamai said in a press release. "In 2020, Akamai delivered more than 300 trillion API requests--a 30% year-over-year increase. API acceleration uses special-purpose hardware, reserved capacity and prioritized routing to help ensure API transactions are completed successfully."

The new EdgeKV database is a globally distributed key-value store that simplifies and accelerates database functions for edge applications, the company said. It requires no complex query language and supports a wide range of data types.

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"With this latest platform release, we hope to accelerate this innovation by giving developers the ability to build truly transformative applications at the edge," said Lelah Manz, senior vice president, Edge Technology Group at Akamai, in a press release. "We know that we're just scratching the surface and can't wait to see what new ideas take shape using EdgeWorkers and the Akamai platform."