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Akamai - couldn't live without it!
February 09, 2018

Akamai - couldn't live without it!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Akamai

Akamai is primarily used within our company as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and caching framework for our public facing websites, enabling us to offload from our servers a vast amount of rich content and rarely changed items freeing up resources on our estate and enabling us to reduce our infrastructure, saving money and overheads in time.
  • Content offloading - once rules are set up within Akamai you don't need to even think about how many images or large JavaScript or CSS files (for example) are being served from your own estate, Akamai takes care of it all via rules that are quick, easy and flexible.
  • Page caching - for pages that don't change very often Akamai allows you to set up rules, quickly and easily, to serve up your page content for you, which takes even more load away from your origin servers.
  • Quick rollback - the Akamai system allows easy testing of rules and changes via a staging system, and also offers a quick rollback option, which is perfect for the rare occasions when something has been set up incorrectly.
  • Comparing releases - you have a facility to compare releases, which is good but is at a very granular level and I think the UI for this could be improved as it is essentially an XML text compare.
  • Positive - Akamai vastly reduced the number of content delivery servers needed here, saving money, hardware and management overheads.
  • Negative - I don't think it's a "cheap" option, but also, you get what you pay for and for such a powerful product you don't expect it to be free.
  • Positive - some of the support we have had has been really good.
I have not evaluated or used any direct competitors for Akamai, so it's hard to say how it compares. All I know is that Akamai is very powerful and has now become an integral part of our existing set-up.
Akamai is (as far as I'm aware) class leading in it's offering, although I haven't used anything else - but it is a really excellent CDN where you don't need to update your file references or anything like that, since you pass through Akamai's edge servers IT development teams don't need to change the way in which they would work in order to get the benefits. In terms of less well-suited scenarios - it's hard to say since you couldn't really use it for purposes other than what it's designed for, although the rules do allow for some pretty impacting changes to be possible, you could potentially take the site down if you were working uninformed.