Guest: Matt Berk (LinkedIn)
Company: Akamai (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

As engineering teams look at the cloud-native design to free them from the dependency on a platform and its componentry, they often find themselves trapped in some aspect of their architecture with a dependency that prevents them from truly benefitting from the cloud — they can’t easily move from one cloud provider or another, or run their workload across multiple regions within cloud providers. When customers take a cloud-native approach, it unlocks portability enabling them to run workloads across multiple cloud providers and regions.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Chicago, Matt Berk, VP of Cloud at Akamai, talks about cloud-native design and some of the major challenges customers are facing when they embrace the lock-in of a platform-centered design. He goes on to discuss some of the ways Akamai is helping customers deal with the complexity of the cloud, and the company’s current focus areas.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Chicago, Matt Berk, VP of Cloud at Akamai, talks about cloud-native design and some of the major challenges customers are facing when they embrace the lock-in of a platform-centered design.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Berk discusses the difference between cloud-native design and platform native: the platform-native approach is where their customers have designed their applications with componentry that locks them into a specific platform; the cloud-native approach unlocks portability enabling them to run workloads across multiple cloud providers and regions.
• While customers often start off with the intention of designing for portability, Berk feels they can fall into a trap where their architecture has a dependence that prevents them from being able to move from one cloud to another, or a workload across regions.
• Berk talks about cloud-native design from the lens of Akamai, saying they encourage their customers to be cognizant of designing applications that take advantage of the best cloud providers. He discusses how optimized cloud offers a more distributed presence and avoids being locked into a platform native design.
• Berk tells us their target audience is developers who take pride in building something unique, taking advantage of various open-source capabilities. He discusses Akamai’s approach to building an ecosystem to serve this audience.
• While some developers are feeling disconnected, Berk feels many are excited about the technical challenges and taking advantage of what new modern clouds offer.
• Berk discusses two key aspects of how Akamai is helping developers better deal with the complexity: making sure the cloud primitives they offer are simple and working with the ecosystem to vet technologies that run well on their platform and highlighting those capabilities and use cases.
• Berk talks us through the relevance of the three-crest wave logo and what they represent: content delivery, cloud security, and cloud computing. He discusses how Akamai is helping solve the challenges their customers are experiencing in these areas and what sets them apart from their competition.
• Edge computing can mean different things to different people but Berk feels that the challenges are the same: working out how they can have data reside as close as possible to where it is being consumed.
• How we consume data is changing significantly, and Berk talks about how what they are seeing with distributed architecture emerging in content delivery, a similar trend is playing out in cloud with Akamai’s global distributed network of 4000 points of presence helping things to be closer to users.
• Berk explains how Akamai’s acquisition of Linode is moving them forward in terms of their ability to address the needs of the modern developer with their managed Kubernetes offering and the option to build their own on top of Akamai. He talks about how Kubernetes has opened up opportunities to build next-generation applications.
• Many vendors are leveraging generative AI for products and Berk discusses how Akamai feels they are well positioned for the inference components of LLM models. He explains why Akamai’s platform is well positioned for this purpose.
• Berk talks about the main points they are seeing from companies moving to cloud, saying that there is a recency bias since many companies are now focusing on observability for reliability and performance purposes but also for optimizing costs. He feels that unfortunately for many customers, cloud is costing more than they projected.
• Local laws like GDPR and California data law are making customers understand where their data resides and what the alternatives are. Berk talks about the benefits of being distributed so that you have more points of presence.
• Berk discusses what open source means to Akamai and having the opportunity to work with Linode. He takes us through some of the initiatives they are focusing on.
• Berk talks about the trend of data needing to live closer to where it is being leveraged. He talks about the use case of EVs and how Akamai is helping customers with their challenges.
• Since acquiring Linode in 2022, Akamai has been investing to enable them to scale at the reach they wanted to. Berk explains some of the work they have done since the acquisition and what their key focuses are for the future.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.