The new data centers of Akamai to the rescue of Dazn
The game that generated the most Internet traffic of the last soccer world championships was France-Morocco with 261 Terabytes per second. A flood of data which, of course, did not allow for interruptions of any kind. At the basis of the miracle, all based on the cloud, in addition to large data centers, there are CDNs (content distribution networks), i.e. servers distributed in multiple geographical areas that speed up the delivery of web content, bringing it closer to the users’ positions.
This allows you to enjoy various services via the Internet such as watching a movie, downloading software, checking your account balance, posting on social networks or making purchases without having to wait for the contents to load. An ever-growing number of online services that must be made usable in the shortest possible time. And if football is king in sport, there are other applications that require very high response speeds, such as the most sophisticated financial services, online auctions and video game challenges for professional users. In these cases, a few moments of waiting, also called latency, make the difference.
The new service from Akamai
Here because Akamaione of the leading companies in the world that deals with CDN, has now launched a service (Connected Cloud) which, thanks to the acquisition of the Linode network, offers a synthesis between cloud services and CDN for the benefit of companies that use applications that require very low latency and high interactivity.
“Akamai already has many data centers around the world,” he explained Luke Moglia, senior solution manager of the company in Italy – and in July we will open two in our country: one in Milan and in the following months also in Rome. The strategy is to decentralize the services to get closer to the end users”.
Is your approach therefore different from that of the big cloud players such as Amazon and Microsoft?
“Competitors have a centralized strategy with large data centers. Instead, we want to manage the data that passes through our servers close to users, which is why we already have a distributed network with 350,000 servers in 4,000 locations worldwide, including with network operators. In this way, also given the proliferation of cyber attacks, it is possible to provide users with a higher level of security”.
The market for cloud services, of which cdn is an important part, are they constantly growing then?
“According to a study by the Milan Polytechnic, the cloud market generated 4.5 billion in 2022, up 15% compared to 2021. But the needs for these services are growing exponentially because they represent the basis of all activities that a company can carry out on the web”.
Akamai is among Dazn’s cdn service providers: will the reception problems by users now be over with the new datacenter in Milan?
“Among our customers there is also Rai which sees a constant increase in online traffic. As the audience grows, bottleneck problems grow. However, the fault is not only of the cdn, there are also many other factors. Furthermore, it is very complex to support the viewing of an event on very different devices such as smartphones, PCs and smart TVs that have very simple operating systems but need a greater number of data flows because the screen is large. And therefore having the closest data centers will certainly be important to guarantee the best user experience whatever the device used”.