Guest: Blair Lyon (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: Akamai (Twitter) | Linode (LinkedIn, Twitter)

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya met up with Blair Lyon, Akamai Head of Cloud Experience, at the Linode headquarters in Philadelphia where they discussed the continuum of compute and latest developments following Akamai’s acquisition of Linode.

• 70-80% of businesses are either using multi-cloud or have a multi-cloud strategy underway. Lyon tells us how around 75-76% of their business customers use multi-cloud configurations and how Akamai and Linode work within that model.
• Lyon explains how their approach is to provide core services along the continuum of cloud to the edge in a way that is portable, cloud-agnostic, and open-source-friendly. He discusses the benefits this brings to developers and businesses such as having greater control, ownership, and agility of their applications.
• As a pure-play cloud provider, Linode is trying to simplify things for customers, enabling them to choose their own path depending on what is right for them.
• According to Linode’s most recent Techstrong Research quarterly report, half of the 800 DevOps professionals from small and enterprise businesses said that they feel they are in direct competition with their cloud provider or will soon be.
• Akamai is an enterprise world-class company with powerful CDNs and security products. Linode boasts a powerful network with great price performance, but it is only in 11 locations currently. Lyon explains that they are doubling their core compute locations and adding dozens of distributed cloud locations to provide an amazing alternative to hyperscalers.
• The edge has limitations as to how much computing capability you have and you do not always want it going back to the data center. This is where having a distributed layer concept for computing can help.
• Lyon discusses how their plans to double the number of distributed cloud locations will be in difficult-to-reach areas, even outside of AWS’ coverage, for containerized computing power. He explains how it will be lighter weight than the core, but more powerful than the edge.
• Currently, the alternative cloud category is now almost as big as Google Cloud. Lyon feels that a lot of the growth can be attributed to the resistance to complexity, looking for better price performance, and being more developer friendly.
• Historically, Linode and other alternative cloud providers have not had the breadth of services or capabilities compared with the hyperscalers. Akamai’s vision is to bring the best CDN on the market and add Linode’s high-performance cloud computing capability to offer a new option in the marketplace.
• Lyon shares the key focuses at Linode and Akamai and what is in their pipeline at the moment, including scaling Linode and launching new critical services. He explains that they will be launching a virtual private cloud (VPC) and they have other product developments taking place too to enable customers to be cloud-agnostic, have portable workloads, and the option to choose the best vendor for their use cases.

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.