Akamai ‘API accelerators’ up developer edge game

Although Akamai sounds a lot like it could be a Japanese games developer company, the organisation is in fact a cloud-services focused Content Delivery Network (CDN) business with a focus on cyber and software application development technologies.

Akamai’s areas of special focus include the ‘edge’ compute space, populated by devices making up the Internet of Things (IoT) as it does.

The company’s Akamai edge platform enhancements this year included a free usage tier, rapid data access and API traffic acceleration.

Akamai’s EdgeWorkers serverless edge compute solution now has more flexibility in terms of abilities to deploy code at the edge.

A new resource tiers offer developers a choice by packaging CPU and memory, along with commensurate pricing options, to best fit their needs.

There are two tiers:

• Basic Compute for applications requiring lower CPU and memory consumption.
  
• Dynamic Compute for those applications demanding higher levels — include free usage for a combined 60 million EdgeWorkers events per month, up to 30 million per tier.
  

In the toolkit here we find EdgeKV, a technology to provide high-availability, low-latency access to data for custom code at the edge.

“This is a globally distributed key-value store that simplifies and accelerates database functions for edge applications. There is no complex query language, and it supports a wide range of data types. As an example, a sports and entertainment company has implemented EdgeKV with EdgeWorkers to perform complex geolocation calculations,” notes Lelah Manz, senior vice president, Edge Technology Group, Akamai, in a press statement.

The capability maps users’ longitude and latitude coordinates in relation to state borders, helping to ensure compliance of their service with local laws.