Akamai recently announced Project Gecko (Generalized Edge Compute), an initiative aiming to integrate cloud services to the edge. Alex Chircop, Chief Product Architect at Akamai, discusses the company’s acquisition of Linode, its latest announcement, and its focus on expanding Akamai’s storage capabilities. On discussing Project Gecko, he says, “Akamai wants to successfully merge all of the benefits that we have from our network with the benefits of the cloud and effectively give application developers the best experience for an edge-native application or an edge-native environment.”

Overview of Akamai and how Project Gecko aims to integrate cloud services to the edge

• Chircop discusses the latest KubeCon noting that it aligns with the CNCF mission to make cloud-native technology ubiquitous. He highlights the diverse and large audience, emphasizing the broad ecosystem at the conference.
• Chircop gives us an overview of Akamai explaining it has the largest CDN, network, and edge environment, consisting of 4000 points of presence (PoPs). He talks about the Linode acquisition and how it has added cloud to their strategy.
• Akamai’s announcements at the event include Project Gecko, which integrates cloud services to the edge. This year, they plan to expand to 100 new cities and edge locations, enabling fully-fledged applications with low latency.

Akamai’s focus on expanding its storage capabilities

• Chircop discusses Akamai’s goal to provide storage expertise and expand Akamai’s storage capabilities within the cloud environment following their acquisition of Ondat.
• Chircop explains his role at Akamai, working on the architecture for various components within the cloud environment, with a strong focus on storage platforms due to his background.
• Chircop has been involved in the CNCF Storage Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for several years. The TAG now has around 180-190 projects and he highlights their main functions.

How the cloud-native community is addressing GenAI needs

• Many cloud-native projects are now addressing the needs of generative AI (GenAI) workloads, such as workload scheduling, inference using WebAssembly (Wasm), and performing inference on CPUs at the edge.
• The cloud-native community is leveraging its expertise in orchestration, monitoring, observability, and security to support GenAI, with new requirements influencing the roadmaps of various CNCF projects.

Guest: Alex Chircop (LinkedIn)
Company: Akamai (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.