After a long pause, Akamai has just rolled out three new features called Cloudlets. Akamai may make this a habit, and release new features more regularly. Akamai’s R&D spend for the quarter ended 6/30/14 was $32M, and prior two quarters ended 6/30/14 was $60M. With that kind of R&D investment, we’re likely to see Akamai in the drivers seat of feature innovation. Introducing new features into the ecosystem takes them a while, since they must roll it out to many POPs, thousands of servers, test it extensively over their global network, build dashboards, reporting system, logging, and so on. The three features are spot on, and help solve many problems encountered by various customers. More to come.
Akamai’s Three New Features
- Edge Redirector Cloudlet: Feature helps customers manage big volumes of 301 and 302 redirects. The Cloudlets Policy Manager is a dashboard that enables clients to set up rules such as “Match by protocol”, “Match by host”, “Match by file extension” and so on
- Visitor Prioritization Cloudlet: Feature provides a “waiting room experience” when back end application become overloaded.” Service helps alleviate overloaded applications during big traffic surges so transactions continue to roll in. One key benefit is Website Outage Protection – this is a must have for ecommerce sites that have experienced outages in the past during the busy holiday season
- Image Converter Cloudlet: Feature enables customer to modify images in the cloud in real time. Through an API, customers can “downsize, resize, and crop images”. Also, images can be compressed, converted to other formats JPEG=>GIF, and background color may be altered