Just when you thought all CDN business models have been exhausted, here comes a new one. At Velocity, I came across Appcito, a Santa Clara based start-up founded in 2013, offering a very interesting service. Appecito raised $7.5M in Series A funding, and has a high-caliber executive team coming from Juniper, F5 Networks, Citrix, and Barracuda Networks. Appcito offers a subscription based cloud service (microservice) that helps DevOps folks deploy, secure and accelerate applications in cloud environments, like AWS. The main product is called “CAFE “, which stands for Cloud-native Application Front-End. The three pillars of the CAFE service are Availability, Performance and Security.
Appcito has been called everything from an “Application Delivery Service” to a “New Load Balancer, Designed for the Docker Age”. Siva Mandalam, VP Product at Appcito called it a “front-end for cloud services, providing infrastructure support” and “allows organizations to automatically insert a service in front of an application”. Let’s dummy down all the fancy buzzwords, and describe what is the Appcito service:
- CDN-in-the-Docker
- CDN-in-the-Container
- CDN-in-the-VM
Whereas OnApp offers CDN-in-a-box, Appcito offers CDN-in-a-Container. Appcito is a front-end service, just like a CDN is a front-end service. Appcito takes CDN functionality, and inserts it next to the application running within a container, Docker, or VM. Appcito provides functionality similar to a CDN, however, their product doesn’t run over their own CDN infrastructure, but leverages the infrastructure of the cloud provider. This idea is genius and creative. What makes Appcito a CDN like company? Their feature set, which includes Cloud WAF, DDoS Mitigation, Bot Protection, Dynamic Site Acceleration, SSL, Load Balancing, URL Rewrites, Caching, Mobile Optimization, Compression, Dynamic Image Optimization, SPDY Support, and so on. Make no mistake, Appcito is a new kind of CDN business model. More to come.
Background
- Company: Appcito
- Started: 2013
- Raised: $7.5M Series A
- LinkedIn Employee Count: 36
- Investors: The Fabric, March Capital Partners an Atlas Ventures
- Co-Founders: Kama Anand (CEO) and Alak Deb (Chief Architect)
- Products: Dynamic Site Acceleration, Load Balancing, Proxy Services (Caching), WAF, Bot Protection, SSL, DDoS Protection, SPDY Support, Dynamic Image Optimization
- Value Prop: Instead of CDN-in-a-box, its CDN-in-a-Container