DEVOPSdigest

Akamai announced March 2020 updates to the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform.

Increasingly, Akamai customers are embracing DevOps methodologies within their organizations. With this release, Akamai ushers in a new era of high-speed deployments and configurations by putting greater control in the hands of developers and thorough integration with existing CI/CD workflows. Now, new properties can be spun up and configuration changes deployed in a matter of minutes using our UI, APIs, or connectors.

New Terraform provider and templates allow customers to quickly onboard new properties and make configuration changes in a replicable and predictable fashion as part of their CI/CD processes. Developers can provision and manage properties and DNS zones as code -- programmatically managing site delivery.

In addition, Akamai streamlined the processes for spinning up new properties to greatly reduce the time and workload involved in creating new digital experiences.

Also with this release, the Akamai Pipeline now syncs with the Akamai Control Center to capture any manual configuration changes and incorporate them into your CI/CD workflow.

The net result is a high-velocity deployment experience engineered with the needs of DevOps practitioners and other high-performance development and operations teams in mind.

Akamai's EdgeWorkers puts computation and logic as close as possible to your users for fast development and implementation of modifications to digital experiences. Just as caching content at the edge enhances delivery, moving the applicable logic to the edge can help improve the performance of your applications and properties. Because EdgeWorkers is JavaScript-based, developers are able to work in a language they are familiar with -- unburdened from having to learn a new syntax. EdgeWorkers enables teams to work independently, spinning up new microservices and focusing on the logic relevant to their particular service.

With EdgeWorkers, serverless functions run directly on the edge. Simple services have full access to the request and delivery insights; more complex microservices can leverage data embedded in the function or remote data solutions. Services can access all of the data from the HTTP request, including cookies, headers, URL, and query parameters. Read our detailed post on how to create microservices using EdgeWorkers.

EdgeWorkers is currently available to Akamai customers.

EdgeWorkers now provides controls for content caching at the edge, helping developers to quickly and programmatically impact customers' digital experiences. In moving content and computation to the edge, latency and dependencies on origin infrastructure are greatly reduced. This allows your teams to conduct A/B testing and feature experiments using cached content instead of taxing internal resources. You can also personalize customer experiences by modifying the path to cached images and other content based on variables such as customer location or time of day.

New capabilities in the March 2020 release include:

■ Change URL and Origin Support: You can now modify both the path and query arguments for a request and determine to which origin the request should be routed. Changes to the user experience include:
- Device personalization without redirects
- Image optimization for device and browser
- Origin load balancing
- A/B testing using cached content
- Controlled rollouts of new applications

■ Cache Key Controls: To optimize cached delivery, you can now programmatically define cache keys. Optimizing keys ensures the correct cached content is delivered, and improves offload and performance.

■ Failover Integration: The new failover integration enables you to provide an alternative action when an EdgeWorker function fails. You can specify content to be served in place of the error status code as a redirect or new request (even to another origin).

■ Sandbox Integration: New Sandbox integration lets you build and test EdgeWorkers locally or centrally in an Akamai Sandbox environment prior to deployment.

■ TypeScript Bindings: Akamai published TypeScript bindings to the EdgeWorkers JavaScript API. TypeScript development provides useful IDE integrations for faster and more accurate coding, preventing bugs found late in the release cycle.

■ Expanded Testing -- Updates to Test Center and Sandbox: The March 2020 includes improvements to developer-focused testing options. Akamai added a GUI for one-click Sandbox testing. Akamai also deployed multiple improvements to Akamai Test Center, including:
- Default test suites
- Test case cloning
- PDF reporting