Guests: Billy Thompson (LinkedIn) | Stephen Rust (LinkedIn)
Company: Akamai (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

The data world we live in is a key driver for pushing cloud native further into edge native. While there is an expectation that moving data closer to end-users will enhance performance and reduce latency, edge hosts may have resource constraints that can present challenges. One company that is working to facilitate this shift is Akamai.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk recorded at the KubeCon in Chicago, Billy Thompson, Solutions Engineering Manager at Akamai and Stephen Rust, Lead Principal Software Engineer at Akamai, discuss the trend of pushing cloud native further into edge native, what this means in terms of the challenges, and how Akamai is helping. They talk about developer experience and how they are supporting them in this evolving landscape.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Thompson and Rust talk about their experiences at KubeCon saying it has been an opportunity to get outside perspectives in the community and talk to people doing similar things to Akamai.
• Key themes of this year’s KubeCon include security, observability, and edge. Rust talks about how edge means different things to different people and from Akamai’s perspective it means bringing compute closer to the users.
• There are a lot of Kubernetes distributions meant for the edge and Rust explains that this is a significant part of Akamai’s market. He talks about the Kubernetes offering they are working towards.
• Thompson explains that there is still a need for portability when it comes to pushing cloud-native further into edge-native. He talks about the paradigm shift where edge-enabled cloud native applications can take advantage of edge hosts that have resource constraints and other things where it needs to be ephemeral.
• Thompson discusses some of the pain points they see, such as needing data persistence in low-latency real-time applications with distributed databases. Akamai is helping to tackle these issues by building partner ecosystems, putting together different combinations of technology stacks, and cloud-native tooling.
• Developer experience is a key topic and Thompson tells us Akamai is taking Linode’s simplicity model for developer experience and matching the scale enterprises need. He talks about how giving developers an easier, more streamlined experience to get started helps with scalability and portability.
• Thompson emphasizes the importance of maintaining simplicity when it comes to developer experience. He talks about the human element of Akamai and Rust notes that from a technology perspective, introducing new management services to abstract the complexity of Kubernetes helps.
• Whereas cloud-native experience involves interacting directly with Kubernetes, a platform-native experience can be built for you where the workflow is documented with prescriptive guidance by a provider so that you are not going directly to the Kubernetes.
• Rust believes security is a shared responsibility: providers need to ensure the security of their infrastructure and users are responsible for building secure applications. Thompson discusses the two cures to a bad security posture, an embarrassing security incident, and good security awareness training.
• Rust talks about what distributed means saying it is having your application as close to the user as possible, but distributed locations are often resource-limited. He discusses how micro-segmentation can address this problem. Thompson talks about data sovereignty and strategies for geo-distributed applications.
• We live in a data-centric world and Thompson discusses the growing importance of edge computing in emerging use cases like gaming and VR. Akamai’s distributed network is the world’s largest but the data still frequently has to go to an origin. He talks about moving the processing of the data closer to end users.
• Akamai has doubled its footprint in the past few months and is working on launching more data centers. Thompson and Rust talk about the company’s key focuses and what is in the pipeline for them in the near future.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.