Akamai unveils plans to double Linode global footprint

Six months after the $900 million USD acquisition of cloud hosting provider Linode, Akamai has announced an expansion to the Linode footprint, adding 12 data centres to its global network.

In addition, the company is evaluating more than 50 underserved cloud service locations as possible future ‘Distributed Sites’ where Akamai will provide basic services.

Data centre facilities will be built following the specifications for existing Linode locations and use the Linode product suite. The first data centre will be built in Ashburn, Virginia in the U.S. data centre corridor; with additional locations to follow in early 2023. Future locations include Amsterdam, Paris, Rome and Stockholm in Europe; Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and Seattle in the U.S.; and Chennai, Delhi, Jakarta and Osaka in APAC.

In the blog announcing the company’s planned expansion, Shawn Michels, VP of Product Management and Akamai, said, “We’re prioritizing these new sites based on customer demand, market analysis, and existing and predicted compute and delivery volume. We’ve also looked at locations that open Akamai Linode cloud services to new markets (for example, Miami and Sao Paulo are strategic to serving customers in the LATAM market) and assessed what was technically feasible to make sure each location can support our growth now and into the future.”

At the time of the Linode acquisition, the company explained that its strategy was to expand compute capabilities and respond to increasing customer requests to provide edge services. While they could have created a network from scratch, the team decided that the Linode acquisition would provide the same result on a much faster timeline.

The ‘Distributed Sites’ strategy supports the improvement of Akamai edge capabilities as well. As Michels noted, there is a need for large sites that offer the full Linode product suite – but also access to smaller, more agile variants in more remote areas. “The goal is to try to push data and try to push parts of the application as close to the user as possible.”

“What we’re hearing from some of our customers is that in order to serve their audience as they build more distributed applications, and as they move into things like microservices, what they would like is VMs and a block storage offering in a more difficult-to-reach region; where maybe the networking or data centre infrastructure isn’t as robust as it is in other regions.”