Akamai CDN vs. BlueCat Integrity

Akamai is a superior premium services offering if that's what you need from a CDN. For more typical use cases, we're often more often than not implementing MaxCDN, or integrated CDNs from cloud providers (e.g. CloudFront, Azure CDN, etc). If you find that Akamai's offerings are really what you need, and you are okay paying the premium, the services themselves are great. There's a reason they're used by major enterprises of all sizes, and used for hosting video content from the NFL, etc.

Incentivized

It can act as a reasonable DNS and DHCP solution if money allows you chose to have a dedicated (virtual) appliance.

Incentivized

• Caching is one of the greatest benefits that Akamai allows for, saving time, money and experiencing the user experience.
• Knowing they provide DDOS and other attack protection gives you peace of mind.
• How finely you can tune all of the different settings available to you, from blocking IPs, cache settings, headers, redirects and even handling error statuses .

Incentivized

• IP management
• DNS server
• TFTP

Incentivized

• Akamai platforms does not come with an intuitive UI to configure and it requires training for set up.
• Akami is mostly costly and will be proven very expensive for small organization that are not scaled.
• Akami activation takes a longer time for a lot of testing with multiple scenarios especially with edge servers scenarios.

Incentivized

• GUI interface could use some touch-ups. For example, saving a configuration is not the easiest thing to do.
• Hypervisor compatibility (currently doesn't support Nutanix AHV).
• Not too many KBs publicly available.

Incentivized

Their support documents are excellent and provide a lot of useful information for all their services. The only reason I didn't give them a 10 is that the time it takes for them to respond to an issue could be slightly faster.

Incentivized

Akamai offers sophisticated security and defense layers in addition to its content delivery network. Its focus on security is well known and beats offerings from AWS and Azure to punches. It redefined the cloud security market by extending its core offering.

Incentivized

For all it's worth, it's a Linux based appliance and does offer a high availability design. It does offer IP address management and can scan your network through ICMP and SNMP. It does support role-based access controls for admins.

Incentivized

• Positive - Akamai vastly reduced the number of content delivery servers needed here, saving money, hardware and management overheads.
• Negative - I don't think it's a "cheap" option, but also, you get what you pay for and for such a powerful product you don't expect it to be free.
• Positive - some of the support we have had has been really good.

Incentivized

• CONS: Not up to speed with market-leading virtualization technologies such as Nutanix.
• PROS: Reliable solution.
• PROS: The design can be confusing for the folks used to Infoblox as it utilized 1 controller called Bluecat Address Manager and the actual DNS/DHCP servers named BDDS.

Incentivized