As the cloud native ecosystem continues to evolve, Akamai stands at the forefront of transforming distributed computing, network delivery, and application deployment.
In an exclusive interview with VMblog ahead of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024, Mike Maney, Cloud Strategist at Akamai, offers a compelling glimpse into the company's strategic approach to addressing the most pressing challenges in Kubernetes adoption. From their world's most distributed cloud computing platform to their commitment to open source principles, Akamai is positioning itself as a key enabler of next-generation cloud infrastructure that promises simplicity, portability, and global scale.
VMblog: If you were giving
a KubeCon attendee a quick overview of the company, what would you
say? How would you describe the company?
Mike Maney: Akamai
powers and protects life online. We pioneered the content delivery network
twenty-five years ago to help solve what at the time was referred to as the
World Wide Wait. We then added world class security solutions into the mix,
helping users protect the customers, data, and systems that were critical to
their business. And, most recently, we layered full-stack compute capabilities
into our quiver with the acquisition of Linode. It's a potent combination of
cloud, security, and delivery.
Today,
Akamai operates the world's most distributed cloud computing platform. Our
planetary scale allows developers and enterprises to deliver better experiences
by putting workloads closer to users, devices, and sources of data. Many of the
biggest companies in the world trust Akamai to make life better for billions of
people, trillions of times a day through digital experiences like shopping
online, playing games, streaming sports and concerts, managing money, and all
the hundreds of ways we use and depend on the internet.
VMblog: Your company is sponsoring this year's KubeCon
+ CloudNativeCon event. Can you talk about what that sponsorship looks
like?
Maney: Sponsorship
is as much about supporting the community as it is securing a booth. At the end
of the day, that's really what KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is about. To paraphrase
Thomas Haden Church's character in the movie "We Bought a Zoo": "I like the
conference. I love the people."
We're a Gold Member of the CNCF and a Platinum Sponsor of the event. You can
find us at booth (B2) where we'll be handing out cool swag and stickers, and
raffling off daily premium LEGO® sets. You'll be able to interact with our cloud
native experts and watch a world class Professional Brick Builder in action.
Akamai
folks will be leading several sessions at the event, too. You can learn more
about our presence here: https://akamai.folloze.com/kubeconnam2024
VMblog: What do you attribute to the success and growth
of this industry?
Maney: Kubernetes
itself drove a lot of the industry's growth. As cloud computing matured,
customers needed a better deployment and operating experience. But, despite its
immense value, running Kubernetes at scale isn't easy. The power of the open
source community helped ease that complexity by creating a range of best
practices and tools to smooth some of that friction and help Kubernetes succeed
at enterprise scale.
Looking
ahead-and not just in the context of Kubernetes-customers are seeking services
that are more efficient, less complex and costly, and, increasingly, more
distributed. Greater portability is at that heart of that: the ability to build
solutions that are less proprietary and more cloud and edge native.
VMblog: Do you have any speaking sessions during the
event? If so, can you give us the details?
Maney: Yes, in
fact we have four presentations:
VMblog: What are you personally most interested in
seeing or learning at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon?
Maney: I
always look forward to talking to developers about what challenges they're
facing with Kubernetes adoption and how they're solving the big, thorny
questions. On the flip side, I also look forward to hearing about the successes
people have with cloud native technologies. But, more than that, I'm interested
in catching up with the people in the community that I've come to know and
respect over the years. Beyond the bits and bytes, it's the humans who power
this ecosystem.
VMblog: What kind of message will an attendee hear from
you this year? What will they take back to help sell their management
team and decision makers?
Maney: We're
going to be talking a lot about simplicity at scale, and the fact that
developers and operators need tools and services that make life easier-easier
to build, deploy, and manage the applications that serve their users, at global
scale. For Akamai, that's about the scale and power of our distributed cloud
and network, but it's also about open source and portability, and the value of
reducing lock-in to give our customers more control.
VMblog: While thinking about your company's solutions,
can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique?
What are your differentiators? What sets you apart from the competition?
Maney: Applications
and data are moving out to the edge. Driven by the rise of AI, but it's also
driven by the need to deliver a better experience in a world where we expect
our apps to behave like they were served from our pocket instead of a server in
a big data center somewhere on the other side of the world.
That's
where Akamai's scale and decades of experience set us apart. Akamai is the
cloud platform for companies to build and deliver distributed, low latency
applications across the entire continuum of compute. No other platform has the
planetary scale and ability to bring the cloud to more hard to reach locations.
We're committed to maintaining an open cloud platform, providing our customers
with cloud computing services that are easy to use and flexible so they can be
deployed wherever applications and workloads need them. And because Akamai
operates the world's most distributed network, with interconnected services
that run on our enterprise-grade backbone, we can maximize traffic offload for
workloads and minimize egress costs across a customer's multicloud landscape to
deliver unmatched price performance.
We've built
the cloud for the next generation of applications that cloud native communities
are migrating to.
VMblog: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is typically a great
venue for a company to launch a new product or an update to an existing
product. Will your company be announcing anything new? If so, can
you give us a sneak preview?
Maney: It is a great venue for launches. And, yes, we will have an announcement about
something new and exciting - and, dare I say, novel - that tackles some of the
thorniest challenges to Kubernetes adoption. Stay tuned for the big unveil!
VMblog: With regard to containers and Kubernetes, is
there anything holding it back from a wider distribution? If so, what is
it? And how do we overcome it?
Maney: Complexity
has always had one foot on the brake of Kubernetes adoption, and that's simply
because infrastructure is hard. Cost of scaling an environment has been an
ongoing issue as well. But perhaps the biggest issue is lock-in. Kubernetes is
open source, and portability should be one of its hallmarks. All of us in this
industry have a responsibility to engineer our offerings in ways that preserve
as much of that portability as possible so we're preserving one of the primary
reasons enterprise users are attracted to open source in the first place.
VMblog: The keynote stage will be covering a number of
big topics, but what big changes or trends does your company see taking shape
for 2025?
Maney: We continue
to see a shift from the last decade's centralized cloud model to architecture
that is more modern and distributed. By all accounts, that trend shows no signs
of abating. In fact, it'll likely get stronger as more apps and data get pushed
to the edge.
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