G-Core Labs has been rapidly innovating its existing product portfolio to meet the growing needs of the edge network. Dmitriy Akulov, the founder of jsDelivr, appfleet, and Prospect One studio that created DNSPerf, CDNPerf and PerfOps, recently joined G-Core to help with this initiative.
We recently caught up with Dmitriy to discuss CDN, DNS and the cloud and what it means for the modern and future web.
VMblog: How do you compete in the global CDN/DNS/Streaming/Cloud markets, given the total commoditization of these services?
Dmitriy Akulov: Traditional CDNs and hosting will have a hard time growing if they insist on simply serving traffic or providing basic hosting services. The price of bandwidth and servers keeps going down and the competition keeps innovating.
To compete and stay relevant you need to keep innovating and releasing new features that are tightly integrated into your product offering. CDNs must become edge app hosting platforms to allow users to run their code on the edge and process everything, not just static content.
Cloud providers will need to simplify and automate their services while still adding more and more managed features.
Developers will always prefer the cloud platform that allows them to solve their problems quickly without thinking too much about the infrastructure and global performance. There are many ways to make this happen and the companies that realize it and build the solution that match the needs of the modern enterprise will succeed.
VMblog: What web development trends in terms of performance would you point out? What is the market direction and future?
Akulov: Web performance is becoming more critically important every year. Google is already using webpage speed as a ranking factor and there are a lot of research papers proving that every millisecond delay directly translates to lost revenue.
Fortunately, dev tools, both open-source and commercial have caught up to this. Popular front-end frameworks have started taking performance into account and advertising it as a major feature.
Some new projects go even further and directly integrate edge computing functionality to simplify app deployment and development process of applications that run directly on the edge.
VMblog: How will all of these components come together at G-Core Labs? Tell us about your vision of the Edge Network platform.
Akulov: G-Core Labs is an established company with a huge global infrastructure and resources. My goal is to transform our existing standalone CDN and DNS products into an edge web acceleration and security platform that highlights our global performance and makes it easy for anyone to benefit from it. From free users with personal side-projects to small businesses all the way to big enterprises.
Each backend feature should become a building block to create new and innovative products that will tightly integrate into the existing platform. From edge computing to image processing and simple file delivery.
At the same time, I want to establish a developer-first approach and build a community around our platform. Free features, great documentation, API access to everything, and lots of integrations with existing open-source projects.
VMblog: What’s next for the G-Core Labs team, and market strategy?
Akulov: Our competitors have built great products, but they grew too big so fast and the products have suffered because of that. Unlike them, we are small enough to move fast and yet have enough resources to easily compete with them, both in terms of infrastructure and development.
Our products will be simple to use and intuitive while remaining flexible, and without hiding any advanced features behind paywalls. Everyone deserves to have a faster and more secure web experience.
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