Guest: Mike Maney (LinkedIn)
Company: Akamai (Twitter) | Linode (LinkedIn, Twitter)

The cloud is dotted with all kinds of providers, from the Big 3 and hyperscalers down to alternative cloud and pure-play providers. Which ones will flourish and which ones will get knocked out of business depends on who can offer what customers want: simple deployment, easy management, secure, good price performance, and greater developer control.

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk recorded at the Linode headquarters in Philadelphia, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Mike Maney, a strategist at Akamai Linode, to discuss the current cloud landscape, how the customer needs are evolving, and where Akamai Linode fits in all of these.

Key highlights of this video interview:

• Maney likens the cloud to a big pie with lots of slices and although the big three hyperscalers have big pieces of the pie, the landscape has evolved now to include alternative players, such as Linode, OVH, and Vultr. Akamai’s acquisition of Linode has pushed Linode up the ladder a little bit away from the alternative cloud category.
• AWS has a considerable portion of the market share but there are trust issues. Developers and DevOps professionals voice concerns over being competed with or knocked out of a market. It has been reported that Walmart is building its own cloud because it is worried that AWS will compete against it.
• Maney says that the complexity that people feel with the cloud has been created by cloud providers themselves. Majority of businesses do not need all of the complexity. He explains how many would rather have something simple to deploy, manage, and secure applications. We are seeing a shift away from the big tech companies such as Amazon and Facebook as many people are wanting to take control back. This is where pure-play providers like Akamai and Linode come in to help give control back to developers.
• Organizations are embracing multi-cloud. Perhaps in one use case, they are using AWS and in another, they are using Linode. It comes down to which provider is the best fit for the organization’s needs.
• Akamai Linode aims to help customers become more efficient and help them scale and solve their challenges that they are facing.
• While some companies are large with global high demand and high volume challenges, others just need a website to test new technologies or do simple website hosting. Maney says some providers only service big enterprises and it can be difficult for them to move down a level. This is where Akamai Linode’s unique combination is powerful: a strong cloud provider tied to another with unbelievable scale, security and delivery.
• We are very much at the beginning of the cloud journey and are now seeing a move out to the edge. Maney feels that the next thing for cloud will be serving the entire continuum of computing from the cloud all the way out to the edge. He believes that there are very few players who have the scale, security, and delivery to be able to do that.
• Maney predicts that companies may be more cautious in the future and prefer to maintain the control by putting certain workloads or applications on a different provider. This is where multi-cloud comes in again and how CIOs and CTOs will need to start having more of these difficult conversations.
• There is a huge skills gap right now, but it presents a great opportunity for students and for people in other careers to start to adapt and move over to the cloud.