Public cloud providers constantly seek easier and more cost effective ways to differentiate their offerings and introduce new services.

"As cloud adoption continues to increase, the need for cloud providers to differentiate their current services and prepare for future customer demands is paramount to ongoing success," said Willie M. Tejada, senior vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Cloud Division at Akamai Technologies Inc. Content delivery network (CDN) capabilities offer such an opportunity.

Recognizing the value of elastic CDN services delivered on demand, cloud and managed hosting provider Rackspace is working with Akamai to grow its Cloud Files service "into one of the largest implementations of OpenStack that we know of," said Mark Interrante, vice president of Product Development at the service provider. "We [are also helping customers] avoid lock-in with a proprietary platform for their content." 

Another organization that is providing CDN features via Akamai is Australian cloud storage and infrastructure provider Haylix, leveraging a globally distributed platform to expand the reach of its regional data centers and creating premium services for its cloud storage customers. "We provide cloud storage and server infrastructure for many of Australia's most respected brands," said Michael Richardson, managing director of Haylix. "They need to know that their customers, who may be located around the globe, are going to have a consistent, positive experience when interacting with hosted resources."

Akamai's Terra Cloud Catalyst enables hosted storage, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) vendors of all sizes to easily offer customers subscriptions to core CDN capabilities or differentiate their own services through advanced services such as failover, SSL delivery, streaming video, and support for custom URLs, among others. It securely provisions thousands of domains on demand.

In addition, new granular visibility and reporting down to the individual URL makes it convenient to support multiple billing models based on how customers want to take advantage of the services offered. Providers will also be able to leverage a broader set of services that run on the Akamai Intelligent Platform to stand out from their competition.

For example, pre-configured bundles facilitate the ability to rapidly give cloud platform customers access to desired new services. Fully integrated reporting provides subscribers with a holistic view of their combined services.