How Akamai Is Taking on AWS

Bandwidth Costs – Ingress (Data coming in) in generally free but Egress (Data going out) is expensive,
and Akamai will now charge $0.01 per gigabyte for egress bandwidth. While AWS Customers get 100GB
of Egress prices at $0.09 per gigabyte this pricing from Akamai undercuts AWS. For someone who
needs 10 TB of egress bandwidth, AWS will cost them nearly $900, while Akamai will cost them just
$90.

This strategy offers customers a significant savings over AWS while AWS existing customer bases are
working on actively lowering their bills in these uncertain times. This might lead to AWS’s slow growth
rate.

While existing customers are unlikely to leave early, shifting cloud services does seem to be a possibility
even though switching costs are high. It is manageable through subset of workloads.

As cloud computing customers set their sights on reining in their cloud costs, Akamai could be in a
prime position to steal away some market share.

Introducing Akamai

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American content delivery network, cybersecurity, and cloud service
company, providing web and Internet security services. Akamai's Intelligent Edge Platform is one of
the world's largest distributed computing platforms. The company operates a network of servers
worldwide and rents capacity of the servers to customers wanting to increase efficiency of their
websites by using Akamai owned servers located near the user.

Akamai serves as much as 30% of all internet traffic at any given time, which amounts to more than 3
trillion interactions. Major customers include Apple, BBC, the Olympics, Microsoft, ESPN, Hulu, Adobe,
IBM, Sony, and Yahoo.

Akamai Service

Akamai Technologies, announced in February that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire
Linode, one of the easiest-to-use and most trusted infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform
providers.

Linode’s developer-friendly cloud computing capabilities with Akamai’s market-leading edge platform
and security services is transformational for Akamai. Under terms of the agreement, Akamai has
agreed to acquire all the outstanding equity of Linode Limited Liability Company for approximately
$900 million, after customary purchase price adjustments. Akamai’s existing service currently runs in
100 locations, but the idea is to combine both platforms into one so that at the end, it’s just Linode.

It will bring 3 new "core" cloud computing sites online in the U.S. and Europe. These core sites will
offer all Linode's cloud computing services. Another 10 core sites will go live later in the year, including
planned sites in South America and Asia. Akamai also plans to bring more than 50 "distributed" cloud
computing sites online this year. These smaller sites, none of which are active right now, will offer a
subset of basic cloud computing services. As cloud computing customers set their sights on reining in
their cloud costs, Akamai could be in a prime position to steal away some market share.

Sources - https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/how-akamai-is-taking-on-aws
John Michael Franklin
https://www.akamai.com/newsroom/press-release/akamai-to-acquire-linode
John.michael@cii.in
https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/14/why-akamai-bought-linode/
Supply Chain Consultant
https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmicha
elfranklin/