Opinion The one thing AWS can’t offer is not being AWS. Google and Microsoft can, but then you’re stuck with Google and Microsoft. Each of these cloud infrastructure options – AWS, GCP and Azure – are big, centralised components of bigger organisations with other things on their minds, and a deep aversion to sharing customers.
Akamai has the edge here. It has always just sold cloud infrastructure services to customers it knows shop elsewhere. It doesn’t care who’s hosting its fleet of enterprise clients. The stuff Akamai sells is designed to bolt onto AWS, GCP, Azure, you name it, and do the delivery to the world. The company is intrinsically multi-platform. With last week’s Linode acquisition, Akamai has as little problem adding hosting, storage, and developer-friendly cloud services to its portfolio as a supermarket does adding own-brand cornflakes to its shelves.
Akamai is no supermarket. It’s a highly competent, highly trusted deliverer of high-availability network services to rich companies, and it has the sales and support network to match. Linode’s chief attraction to Akamai wasn’t primarily its technologies or existing infrastructure, things that Akamai could do for itself out of parts it already has at home. Rather, it was Linode’s reputation among its customers, which closely matches what Akamai has among its client base. That it’s up and running is great and gives Akamai a near-instant entry to the cloud compute provider’s club, but it’s Linode’s decades of trust with developers that’s the golden ticket.
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