Akamai
By Akamai Technologies
Akamai is a global content delivery network (CDN) and cloud security platform that caches and accelerates web content across a distributed edge network while providing DDoS protection, web application firewalling, and bot mitigation.
Definition
Akamai is a global content delivery network (CDN) and cloud security platform that caches and accelerates web content across a distributed edge network while providing DDoS protection, web application firewalling, and bot mitigation.
Overview
Akamai was founded by MIT researchers to solve a scaling problem: as more traffic moved onto the web, origin servers struggled to serve every request quickly and reliably worldwide. Its solution was to build one of the internet's first large-scale edge networks — thousands of servers distributed across many geographic points of presence that cache and serve content close to end users, reducing latency and absorbing traffic spikes that would otherwise overwhelm a single origin. Over time Akamai expanded well beyond content caching into a broader edge and security platform: web application firewall and bot-management products that sit in front of applications, DDoS scrubbing capacity to absorb large-scale attacks, DNS services, and edge compute offerings that let developers run logic at the edge rather than only at a central origin. This positions Akamai as both a performance layer and a security layer, competing in different parts of its business with CDNs like Cloudflare and with cloud providers such as AWS and Azure that offer their own edge and security services. Because Akamai sits in front of an origin's traffic, it's commonly deployed by large media, retail, and financial services companies that need both to shave milliseconds off page loads globally and to keep malicious traffic away from origin infrastructure before it ever arrives.
Key Features
- Globally distributed edge network of servers caching content near end users
- Web application firewall (WAF) and API protection for origin applications
- Large-scale DDoS mitigation and traffic scrubbing capacity
- Bot management to detect and block automated/malicious traffic
- Managed DNS with high-availability, low-latency resolution
- Edge compute for running logic closer to users than a central origin
- Media delivery optimizations for large-scale video and streaming