Akamai, the corporate you in all probability largely consider as a content material supply community however that additionally gives safety and edge computing companies, immediately introduced that it has acquired Linode. The value of the acquisition is $900 million, with Akamai anticipating Linode so as to add about $100 million in income for its fiscal yr 2022.
Linode, which launched again in 2003, shortly made a reputation for itself as an inexpensive place to hire digital non-public servers. That was shortly earlier than AWS turned cloud computing right into a buzzword and on the time, VPSs have been the way in which to host your personal web sites or fundamental net apps. Since then, the corporate continued to develop its choices as each the hyper clouds and opponents like DigitalOcean began to emerge. Not like a few of its opponents, Linode boostrapped and by no means took any exterior funding.
At the moment, Linode gives all of the core cloud companies that builders count on (as do many of the early VPS suppliers). That features compute, but additionally block and object storage, managed database, load balancers and, most lately, a managed Kubernetes service for operating containerized functions.
Picture Credit: Linode
Akamai says it’s shopping for Linode to assist it “turn out to be the world’s most distributed compute platform, from cloud to edge.”
“The chance to mix Linode’s developer-friendly cloud computing capabilities with Akamai’s market-leading edge platform and safety companies is transformational for Akamai,” mentioned Akamai CEO and co-founder Dr. Tom Leighton in immediately’s announcement. “Akamai has been a pioneer within the edge computing enterprise for over 20 years, and immediately we’re excited to start a brand new chapter in our evolution by creating a novel cloud platform to construct, run and safe functions from the cloud to the sting. This an enormous win [sic!] for builders who will now have the ability to construct the subsequent era of functions on a platform that delivers unprecedented scale, attain, efficiency, reliability and safety.”
Linode will proceed to function as common in the interim and the corporate says that Akamai has “no intention of fixing what has made us profitable.”
“There may be pure synergy between Akamai and Linode, not solely in our missions and cultures, however within the potent mixture of strengths we every convey to the desk,” writes Linode founder Christopher Aker. “The wedding of Linode’s compute and storage merchandise with Akamai’s serverless, CDN, and safety options, will give clients a broader vary of companies to construct, modernize, and scale the subsequent era of functions.”
Not like Linode, Akamai by no means provided a lot of a self-serve SaaS product for builders, one thing that’s now just about anticipated out there. With this, it’s getting a foothold on this house and buying an organization that, regardless of some safety missteps previously, remains to be spoken of extremely by many builders who’ve used it for each skilled and aspect initiatives over time.
We’ve requested the 2 firms for extra particulars about their future plans and can replace this publish as soon as we hear extra.
