Cloud services provider Akamai Technologies announced availability of Cloudlets, extensions to Akamai solutions that are designed to speed time to market for developers and offload infrastructure demand, providing a specific functionality that is accessed through the Akamai Intelligent Platform.
Cloudlets are being introduced, with the current availability of Edge Redirector, Visitor Prioritization and Image Converter, available to Akamai customers now and which can be accessed, trialed, purchased and deployed through the Luna Control Center.
The company plans to continue to introduce new Cloudlets regularly, ultimately forming a marketplace of extensions where customers can choose which capabilities are best suited to help simplify the development and delivery of their Websites and applications.
“By taking advantage of the advanced functionality that is built into Cloudlets customers can save on development costs, and speed time to market for critical initiatives that would otherwise require in-house development of custom tooling or reliance on third party professional services,” Anthony Larkin, product marketing manager for Web experience at Akamai Technologies, told eWEEK. “Cloudlets help businesses move advanced logic from their data center to run close to the end user on the ‘edge’ of the content delivery network. This often results in end-user performance improvements.”
Edge Redirector is intended to help customers simplify the management of URL redirects for search engine optimization (SEO), marketing campaigns or site content and architectural changes.
Features include management and offload of 301 and 302 redirects to the Akamai Intelligent Platform, ability to make changes with intuitive rules-based user interface and included application programming interface (API), advanced and basic user roles for both technical and business users and bulk upload redirects via .csv format.
Visitor Prioritization is designed to provide a user-friendly waiting room experience when back end applications become overloaded due to surges in visitor traffic, helping to decrease site abandonment when application capacity becomes scarce.
Features include the ability to gain control of traffic accessing data center resources during traffic surges, a branded experience for overflow traffic, protection from site outages during high value or maintenance events, and preservation of scarce application capacity for valuable transactions.
Image Converter is intended to help simplify the complexity and overhead associated with creating, storing and maintaining derivative images when the same image is used in different Web and mobile experiences across multiple end user situations and devices.
Capabilities include reducing volume of bytes necessary to deliver images within a responsive Web design experience to various devices, dynamic manipulations of images in the cloud, tailoring them to the specific use case defined by an API command, and reduced complexity and overhead associated with creating storing and maintaining libraries of derivative images.
“Businesses and organizations must embrace this reliance on mobile devices and uncover new ways to deliver fast, reliable and secure experiences as these technologies and consumers’ expectations continue to evolve,” Larkin said. “This means complementing current cloud environments with services that enable these rich, consistent experiences, and ensuring that they’re working off of a flexible platform that provides control and flexibility.”