Earlier this year, Akamai announced its plans to acquire Linode, the well-loved cloud hosting service, to build out its own cloud and edge computing portfolio. The $900 million acquisition closed last month. While Akamai is still mostly known for its content delivery services, the company started building out more compute-centric services over the course of the last few years, in part because of requests from existing customers. Apple, for example, is using Akamai for its Private Relay service. Now, with Linode, the company plans to quickly build out this portfolio — and in the course of this, transform Akamai into a bit of a different company, too.
To talk about what the acquisition means for the future of Akamai, I sat down with Adam Karon, the company’s COO and GM of its Edge Technology Group.
Karon said he basically spent his entire career at Akamai, which he joined back in 2005, to