Akamai to simplify application acceleration to cloud

BANGALORE, INDIA: Cloud platform provider Akamai Technologies Inc. introduced Terra Alta, a solution designed to address the evolving complexities of application acceleration in cloud.

Akamai’s Terra Alta has been designed to enable an increasingly mobile enterprise user base. Moreover, it helps simplify the process of developing and deploying applications in the cloud, making it easier to optimize hundreds or thousands of applications with greater flexibility and control, says a release.

“Companies want to use the cloud as an enterprise application delivery environment because it’s the most effective and efficient way to reach the broadest set of users. Unfortunately, controlling the cloud can seriously erode the promises and expectations of cloud computing,” stated Willie M. Tejada, Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Enterprise Cloud Division at Akamai. “With the release of Terra Alta, we’re giving our customers powerful solutions specifically designed to provide the best possible performance for their entire portfolio of cloud delivered business applications.”

As applications themselves evolve, Terra Alta helps accelerate complex applications that rely on multiple components, which may include business functions, modules, or web services from within other applications.

And it can be deployed within existing network architecture.

At its core, Terra Alta takes advantage of the distributed Akamai Intelligent Platform to provide enterprises with a set of capabilities aimed at improving user experience for Internet-delivered applications regardless of where they are hosted. 

It comes with new features including:

Enterprise EdgeSM: Terra Alta enhances the reach of the Akamai Intelligent Platform by extending into the enterprise with Enterprise Edge. This virtual machine, running Akamai optimization technology within a customer’s origin, allows optimizations from the Akamai Intelligent Platform to be carried from the Internet into the data center, improving overall application performance across the entire delivery environment.

Edge Load Balancing: For enterprises taking advantage of public cloud deployments, Edge Load Balancing is designed to ensure that application traffic can be load balanced globally across the web before traffic impacts an isolated single data centre.

Enterprise DNS Mapping:  Enables organizations to overcome the performance challenges caused by centralized DNS by dynamically adapting to user location and removing dependencies on enterprise DNS infrastructure re-designs.

Moreover, it also has new features designed to deliver acceleration capabilities across broad set of web applications, including:

Web Deduplication: This feature is designed to ensure that only differences in the objects that have already been sent by the origin are delivered, reducing bandwidth consumption required for application delivery and drastically increasing performance. 

Akamai Instant: Based on web analytical data, Akamai Instant retrieves what are assessed as the most likely pages to be next requested by the user, which can reduce long think times associated with web service calls, database lookups and other processing found in complex applications that can adversely affect application response times.

Dynamic Page Caching:  This capability allows pages that were previously considered dynamic and un-cacheable to be conditionally cached.