Computing at the Edge

by Gregory Griffiths on October 11, 2020

Welcome to the Akamai October 2020 Update – a week of product updates, new features, and innovations. We’ll be highlighting a different area of our portfolio each day this week.

In today’s post, we look at our enhanced edge computing capabilities and how they help developers more effectively and rapidly improve customer experiences on the Akamai platform.

The Next Stage In Edge Computing

Companies are experiencing a shift to a builder culture — one that is built on developers’ ability to directly create and control digital experiences. This cultural shift among our customers has fueled Akamai’s delivery of edge computing solutions and drives the October 2020 updates to our edge computing capabilities.

Deploying logic at the edge brings data, insights, and decision-making closer to the things that act upon them. Akamai provides a reliable and scalable implementation model so that data and computation are not hampered by latency issues that can have a negative impact on digital experiences. The Akamai Intelligent Edge is the largest distributed network platform — empowering developers to create and modify new digital experiences and enabling businesses to take advantage of the benefits of serverless computing.

Our October 2020 platform update includes significant improvements to both EdgeWorkers and Image and Video Manager that provide expanded capabilities for creating new microservices and managing video and image delivery at the edge. We’ve also updated our API for management of Cloudlet applications with simplified provisioning and faster deployment and response times.

Sponsorships Available

What’s New With Edgeworkers

Expanded Microservice Creation At The Edge

As sites and applications move from monolithic builds to creations driven by multiple microservices, the ability to assemble and deliver content from diverse sources becomes increasingly important. With the October 2020 Akamai Platform Update, we’ve expanded the ability of developers to code dynamic content assembly at the edge — creating microservices that include external requests and the ability to manipulate response bodies. The result is even greater innovation at the edge — along with the ability to quickly deliver new digital experiences across our global network, allowing for more innovation with less effort and better performance.

We’ve also added EdgeWorkers resource consumption and performance reporting to the Akamai Control Center and made that data retrievable by API calls. EdgeWorkers not only provides the visibility developers need to understand the performance of the applications they create, but also enables them to manage their CDN as code.

Key Features

External request support Response body manipulation support: Enables dynamic content assembly through support of multiple external requests and through transforming the HTTP request body
Expanded reporting: Delivers new resource consumption and performance reports in the Akamai Control Center and a new API for retrieving resource consumption and performance data
New code editor: Allows developers to write and edit JavaScript code within the Akamai Control Center
Log Delivery Service (LDS) support: Aids debugging and troubleshooting EdgeWorkers JavaScript code through support of event logging and delivery in Log Delivery Service (LDS)
Secure trace headers support: Helps developers debug and troubleshoot their EdgeWorkers JavaScript code; provides runtime diagnostic data via secure response headers
Increased resource limits: Provides increased memory and CPU time limits for support of more complex use cases, such as API orchestration, dynamic content assembly, and JSON Web Token (JWT) verification
Manifest manipulation: Optimizes video streaming content at the edge to enable a wide range of use cases, including server-side ad stitching, content personalization, and content protection capabilities

What’s New With Image & Video Manager

Put Edge Computing To Work For Image And Video Optimization

Akamai Image & Video Manager (IVM) is a software as a service (SaaS) that utilizes Akamai’s edge computing capabilities to optimize image and video files. It automatically creates, stores, and delivers file versions that are optimized for the combination of hardware and software the end user is using to access a site at that very moment. The optimized copy is then delivered to the end user without the need to create multiple versions housed at origin.

Key Features

Video optimization status API: API-retrieve the status of videos in the process of being optimized, as well as derive insight into video optimization tasks that failed
New video quality levels: Two new video quality levels provide additional options to prioritize higher visual quality or greater byte reduction
Images Dashboard – quality level distribution: New metric card visualizes the impact of perceptual quality across all of of your images
Images Dashboard – most requested image widths: New metric card helps you analyze the requested image width versus delivered image in order to fine tune your IVM policies
Policy rollout speed controller: Provides recommendations on the speed with which to rollout changes to existing policies in order to smooth the number of requests to origin
Shared policy sets: Simplifies management across multiple hostnames by allowing customers to apply the same policies across multiple properties within the same policy set configuration
Video analysis report: Analyzes video traffic on the Akamai platform to discover unoptimized short-form videos and estimate potential savings from applying video optimizations

Learn More

We’ve created a number of how-to posts and user stories that detail how Akamai customers are utilizing the new capabilities in EdgeWorkers and IVM to provide better digital experiences to their end users.

You Are Here: Giving Your Users the Local Experience They Deserve

Tailoring experiences based on geography now extends beyond personalization to the more complex realm of data compliance. Read how Akamai customers are able to create true edge-native applications using EdgeWorkers to not only provide geo-location specific content but also stand up geographically enforced e-privacy verification in a matter of minutes.

EdgeWorkers Use Story: Creating high-performing, individualized campaign responses in online retail

The granular data needed for understanding the ROI of myriad marketing campaigns can create a challenge for optimizing performance of sites and applications. Read how one Akamai customer takes full advantage of the content delivery benefits of the edge without sacrificing the customer data garnered from unique campaigns — through their utilization of EdgeWorkers.

Automating Your Edge Compute Workflows with EdgeWorkers and GitHub Actions

By using continuous deployment automation tools, like GitHub Actions, developers are able to simplify deploying EdgeWorkers code within the Akamai Network. EdgeWorkers users: Check out our step-by-step guide to creating an automated workflow for code deployment using GitHub Actions.

For more information on our new EdgeWorkers capabilities, visit our EdgeWorkers developer page and our EdgeWorkers User Guide.

Image & Video Manager

For more information on the newest Image & Video Manager (IVM) capabilities, visit our IVM developer pages and updated documentation. A new Reference Architecture for image and video optimization is available and provides an overview of what the workflow for visual media can look like.

There will be more opportunities to engage with us on this and more at Edge Live | Adapt. Sign up to see how customers are leveraging these improvements, engage in technical deep dives, and hear from our executives how Akamai is evolving for the future.