Akamai Technologies plans to acquire cloud hosting company Linode for $900 million.
Founded in 2003, Linode operates 11 data centers across America, Canada, Germany, the UK, India, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. It does not appear to own the facilities outright - with its Atlanta data center actually a DataBank site, Singapore presence in a Pacnet data center, and Frankfurt locale a Telecity data center - and instead leases space from colocation and wholesale companies.
Focused on developers and small to medium-sized business, it claims to differ from larger rivals like Amazon Web Services by reducing complexity and vendor lock-in.
Akamai helped create the content delivery network (CDN) concept, and now operates more than 275,000 servers across 136 countries. In recent years, it has tried to expand its CDN offering into a wider Edge platform.
“The opportunity to combine Linode’s developer-friendly cloud computing capabilities with Akamai’s market-leading Edge platform and security services is transformational for Akamai,” said Dr. Tom Leighton, CEO and co-founder of Akamai Technologies.
“Akamai has been a pioneer in the Edge computing business for over 20 years, and today we are excited to begin a new chapter in our evolution by creating a unique cloud platform to build, run and secure applications from the cloud to the Edge. This is a big win for developers who will now be able to build applications on a platform that delivers unprecedented scale, reach, performance, reliability, and security.”
In a blog post, Linode founder and CEO Christopher Aker said there was a "natural synergy between Akamai and Linode."
"The marriage of Linode's compute and storage products with Akamai's serverless, CDN, and security solutions, will give customers a broader range of services to build, modernize, and scale the next generation of applications," he added.
In an earnings call, the companies said that together they would create 'the world’s most distributed compute platform – from cloud to Edge – making it easier for developers and businesses to build, run, and secure applications."
The acquisition is expected to close in late Q1 2022, and is subject to the usual regulatory approvals.
The deal comes as rival CDN Cloudflare has begun to dip its toes into the cloud space, with a closed beta trial of R2 Object Storage service - a competitor to Amazon Web Services' S3 - winning over nine thousand customers. The company also offers a 'serverless' functions service known as Edge Workers that is akin to AWS' Lambda offering.
