Akamai Li Wentao: Starting from four major strategies, helping enterprises build a new paradigm for public cloud

In today's digital age, cloud computing has become a must for enterprises. Although public cloud has brought many conveniences to enterprise digital innovation, as the scale of business continues to expand, more and more enterprise managers are not only worried about being locked in by cloud vendors, but also facing huge pressure from rising cloud costs.

So, is there a better option for cloud migration that can avoid being locked in by cloud vendors and significantly reduce cloud costs? Recently, Li Wentao, head of Akamai's Asia Pacific and European cloud computing expert team, shared their views on various issues surrounding public clouds and introduced Akamai 's solutions in detail.

Li Wentao, head of Akamai's cloud computing expert team in Asia Pacific and Europe

Li Wentao said that in addition to the concerns of being locked in by public cloud vendors, the charging systems of large public cloud vendors are also relatively complicated. The initial fees seem very cheap, but the increase in fees is difficult to control and the rate of increase is very fast. Some customers even set up their own "cloud financial management departments and expenditure management departments" to optimize "cloud expenditures." To this end, Akamai acquired Linode and integrated it with its own CDN and cloud security systems to provide a new paradigm of public cloud and a different choice for customers.

Cloud vendor lock-in and cost issues have become the main challenges for enterprises to migrate to the cloud

As we all know, public cloud is very convenient, allowing enterprises to freely choose capacity and switch suppliers according to their actual needs, just like using water and electricity. However, as the scale of cloud computing continues to expand, many enterprises have also expressed some concerns about the use of public cloud.

In Li Wentao's opinion, when enterprises use public clouds, they are mainly worried about being locked in by cloud vendors and the sharp increase in cloud costs. First, Akamai calls cloud vendor lock-in " Vendor Lock-in", which means that large public cloud vendors often want to lock users into their own platforms. Li Wentao said that cloud vendors often lock in users through the following three aspects, namely:

1) Cloud vendors provide their own proprietary software and technologies, allowing customers to use their own proprietary software and technologies to build applications. In this way, users will find that they seem to have built applications on a certain "cloud", but if they want to change a cloud provider or migrate to another "cloud" after one or two years , it will be very difficult.

2) Cloud vendors often charge very high fees for outbound network traffic . Once users upload data to the cloud , it becomes very expensive to move the data away or migrate it to other clouds .

3) Cloud vendors have their own certification systems and unique knowledge and skills. They hope to lock users into their own services, which causes a lot of inconvenience to enterprises. For example, if they want to introduce new suppliers or change suppliers, it will incur high costs.

In addition to cloud vendor lock-in, many users also complain that the costs of using large public cloud vendors are difficult to control and often result in unexpected bills.

Li Wentao said that although the complex managed services provided by large public cloud vendors have certain value, from a cost perspective, there is still a big gap compared to self-built services. Compared with the managed message queues and function-as-a-service products provided by the three major public cloud vendors, self-built services on Akamai Cloud can achieve 76%-85% cloud cost savings. He emphasized that self-built services mean more operation and maintenance costs, so customers need to make a balance to see if these savings are worth some additional labor investment. However , for some high-tech companies with strong technology and strong technical operation and maintenance teams and development teams within the company, self-built services can save huge costs.

In fact, according to a recent report released by IDC , some large high-tech companies and cloud-native companies are even considering moving back to their own data centers or private clouds. This trend is called the "great retreat of cloud loads."

Four strategies to open a new paradigm for public cloud

In order to help enterprises break free from cloud lock-in and reduce cloud costs, Akamai acquired Linode , hoping to "have its cake and eat it too" , with the simplicity and low price of small and medium-sized manufacturers, as well as the high reliability, high scalability, and global infrastructure and customer support capabilities of large manufacturers.

To this end, Akamai announced four major strategies: focusing on infrastructure as a service, embracing open source and cloud neutrality, networking, and edge cloud.

First, Akamai will focus more on infrastructure as a service and on making IaaS extremely cost-effective . Li Wentao said that our choice is to focus on helping customers build a "cloud-neutral" infrastructure cloud.

Second, establish a strategy that embraces open source and cloud neutrality, avoid locking in users in any way, and allow users to migrate flexibly between clouds.

Thirdly, in order to further facilitate the migration of "multi-cloud" and reduce costs, Akamai has made use of its network advantages in CDN to significantly reduce the cost of outbound network traffic to only half a cent per GB ( 1.5 cents/GB in Jakarta and Sao Paulo) . This year, based on the original 11 global data centers, Akamai has added 11 new nodes in Washington, Chicago, Paris, Stockholm, Milan, Osaka, Jakarta, Chennai, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles, and Miami to strengthen its global coverage capabilities.

According to Li Wentao , Akamai has accumulated a global network capacity of more than 1,000 Tbps in terms of CDN , has more than 4,100 edge data center nodes around the world, and has cooperated with more than 1,200 major global ISP manufacturers.

Li Wentao said that many Chinese customers want to reach some developing economies when "going overseas", such as: South America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the Belt and Road countries, etc. It is difficult to find a high-quality cloud or IDC service provider in these places. At this time, Akamai becomes a strong partner to help these customers conduct business in some difficult-to-reach areas. At the same time, many data centers around the world are interconnected through the Akamai CDN backbone network to achieve lower latency, higher throughput and better economy.

Finally, the edge cloud strategy. Akamai hopes to help Chinese companies reach these hard-to-reach areas with edge deployment. It is reported that with Akamai's edge computing capabilities and high-speed network capabilities, it can help media, entertainment, video, e-commerce, financial technology, games and other industries to significantly reduce expenses and save costs while improving efficiency .

"We adopt an open technology system to help customers build their applications through open source software and third-party tools. We focus on providing high-quality IaaS layer services to help customers truly build portable and migratable cloud-neutral applications. " At the end of the interview, Li Wentao said that when building applications on Akamai's cloud, users do not have to worry about the risk of being locked in and can easily migrate to other "clouds". This is the freedom we give to customers, and we use it to help customers reduce the business risks brought by cloud vendor lock-in.