S1E25: The Past, Present, and Future of Edge Technology

Episode Summary:

Today’s episode features an interview that took place live at the 2020 Edge Computing World Conference between Matt Trifiro and special guest Jonathan Seelig, Co-founder and CEO of Ridge and Co-Founder of Akamai Technologies.

As a co-founder of Akamai, Jonathan is one of the true godfathers of edge computing, having enjoyed an extremely impressive two-plus decade career in technology as a founder, investor, and board member.

In this interview, Jonathan and Matt discuss the past, present, and future of edge technology, starting with the origins of Akamai at MIT in 1997, through to Jonathan’s latest venture at Ridge, where he is building the distributed cloud platform that will power the next generation of cloud native applications.‍

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Key Quotes:

• “One of the things that happened at Akamai is that, because this distributed infrastructure existed for content because the CDN was created, and because you could get scalability, reliability, and performance in ways that you never were going to be able to out of centralized infrastructure…Netflix happened and Hulu happened and online gaming happened.  And even if some of those companies were never my customers, the reason that those capabilities exist in the marketplace is because the CDN was created. It completely changed what entrepreneurs and what content owners believed to be possible.”
• “One of the things that we were observing in 2018 is that there just didn't seem to be a lot of really good thinking about how to create very highly distributed infrastructure for compute…The argument that we're making at Ridge is that applications that are going to really change the world going forward…are going to care a lot about geography and care a lot about being highly distributed.”
• “I can't imagine that if we sit down and have a conversation five years from now about the cloud, that three companies will have 100% market share of the industry. We've never seen an infrastructure company become a full monopoly…The idea that we're going to have one infrastructure provider that will be able to do everything that a company needs them to do all over the world in every single location just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.”
• “Five years from now, I would imagine that ten milliseconds of latency for the vast majority of users in the world is sort of de rigueur…And then we'll talk about how hard it is to get single digit milliseconds of latency and how that's going to be 2025’s edge cloud.”
• “None of us are going to solve this on our own…for these ideas to work, this is an ecosystem play. One of the things that makes the hyperscale clouds so powerful is the ecosystems that they have developed around their platform…You have to pull together as an ecosystem as opposed to a single vendor. That, to me, is the thing that's going to require the most advancement for this to become more mainstream and more accessible over time.”

Sponsors:

The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is Zenlayer. Improving user experience doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. Zenlayer helps you lower latency with on-demand edge services in over 150 PoPs around the world. Find out how you can improve your users' experience today at zenlayer.com/edge

Links:

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn

Follow Jonathan on Twitter