When Amazon came out with CloudFront, many in CDN industry were nervous, including Akamai. It was the unknown that we feared, because CloudFront brought a whole new low-cost structure into the picture. The impact was immediate, and pricing for CDN services and CDN origin storage dropped, big time. The price drop for CDN storage was dramatic to say the least, where CDN storage prices pre-AWS were $1/GB and selling like hotcakes, to a dime/GB. It got so bad that some in the industry predicted that Amazon would disrupt Akamai’s CDN business, and all other CDNs. Well, the cat is out of the bag, the unknown is known, and CloudFront is 8x-10x smaller than Akamai.
However, rest assure that Akamai and many others have not forgotten. In the tech industry, there is nothing more noble than serving revenge on a nice cold dish, and Akamai should accommodate by getting into the Cloud Compute and Cloud Storage business by summer. If Akamai were to take this bold step, it would throw the entire cloud industry into a spin, including Wall Street. Akamai brings a whole new dimension into the cloud compute business, that others can’t match – thousands of PoPs around the world. And since Akamai is the CDN of choice for the Fortune 1000, and largest institutions in the world, you bet there is a guaranteed baked in customer base of hundreds of millions of dollars.
I bet if Akamai announced this bold move, Microsoft would change its mind and come out with something like this, “we’re back in the CDN biz, and we just added 100 PoPs.” How does this name sound for Akamai’s possible new endeavor? The New AWS, as in “Akamai Web Services”.
Akamai Web Services (AWS)
Azure just rolled out the “Largest VM in the Cloud” called the G-Series. The Standard_G5 has 32 Cores (Xeon E5 v3), 448GB RAM, and 6.5TB of SSD storage, at a cost of $7,180/month, if used consistently for the whole month. Amazon has come out with the New C4 Instances, with the c4.8xlarge has 36 CPUs having 60GB of RAM, throughput of 4Gbps, and a price tag of $1,336 per month, if used consistently. Those servers are cool, but Akamai can do something a little better, with a server that has more RAM and SSD Storage. Lets take a page out from the Incapsula marketing book, and give it a cool name like
“Akamai Bare-Metal VM Beast”
Specs: Dual E5-2600 MB, Xeon E5-26xxV2, 24 Cores, 768GB RAM, 12TB in SSDs, Myricom 4x10Gbps NIC