What’s New in Web Performance? – March 2019

by Anthony Larkin on March 4, 2019

Organizations that do business on the web are at various stages in their digital transformation journey. Some are developing some of the most innovative and immersive digital experiences on the web, others are, for the first time, figuring out how to safely move applications to the cloud with minimal disruption to the user experience, and most are somewhere in the middle.

What’s exciting is that Akamai offers solutions that can help you gain a competitive edge in your market at any stage in your digital transformation journey. As digital experiences have evolved, content, applications, and architectures have changed also – and it’s critical that organizations consider what they need to do to keep up and forge ahead in an ever changing web delivery landscape.

Akamai enables a flexible enterprise architecture that protects your revenue & reputation by establishing consistent policies and behaviors across the cloud application ecosystem so organizations can accelerate innovation and gain greater agility with:

Insight – Powerful real user performance data and analysis to guide development efforts and inform strategic decision making.
Intelligence – Automated optimizations to streamline workflows and drive fast and engaging customer experiences.
Agility – Data access and controls to safely increase release velocity and integrate with your DevOps practices.

Leverage Akamai to create an enterprise architecture that enhances and adapts to your changing needs keeping teams focused and aligned on your strategic differentiation. We’re excited to introduce new capabilities in the following areas:

Intelligent data-driven performance

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Adaptive acceleration capabilities leverage a learning engine powered by real user performance data to optimize the delivery of complex applications over the web. New enhancements include font preloading to improve page performance and usability enhancements for users of A2s command line interface.

The use of video drives more engagement online

In an effort to make experiences more engaging, the use of video has increased, but many organizations that want to take advantage of this media struggle to efficiently create and manage video content in a way that doesn’t slow down their web teams or their website. Image Manager has expanded to offer short-form video optimization to help you automatically transform and deliver tailored videos to each end user and device to streamline and offload development workflows.

API traffic is exploding

API traffic is exploding online and across the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform. As more innovative digital experiences and collaborative business opportunities emerge leveraging APIs as their connective tissue, they need scale, protection, and governance to be successful. Akamai’s API Gateway is introducing throttling to govern API traffic so you can manage peak demand or over-consumption that could affect service availability for other consumers or melt your infrastructure. Akamai’s platform offers scalable delivery and protections for APIs, and with these enhancements to API Gateway, now offers a robust platform solution for mission critical APIs.

The evolution of the web

Some of the brightest architects and engineers at Akamai have been key contributors to web standards from the very beginning. HTTP/2 is now widely supported, but only a few service providers have a successful implementation according to independent performance testing. In fact, we’re so proud of our implementation, as part of this release, Akamai will auto-enable HTTP/2 for eligible traffic for all customers on the platform while we continue work on QUIC and help lay the foundation for HTTP/3. We’ve also enhanced support for TLS 1.3 to be compatible across all browsers which is the latest version of the TLS protocol that keeps your communications over the web secure.

Using Akamai the way you want

For Developers and DevOps Engineers we’ve made enhancement to the experience you have in using Akamai products. To improve release velocity and inform agile decision making, DataStream delivers near real-time, middle-mile CDN metrics via push and pull APIs to your preferred log management and analysis tools. For Admins, We’re also excited about new ways for customers to access support and consume service from Akamai experts along with a huge user experience upgrade in the Akamai Control Center application.

As you evolve your customer experiences to be richer and more engaging Akamai’s Intelligent Edge Platform can supercharge your digital transformation journey. Check out these enhancements and more at https://www.akamai.com/us/en/release-notes/mar-2019.jsp.