Intro

Have you ever wondered how to onboard a Website or Application into Akamai?

How do you improve the delivery of a Website or Application using the solutions available in Akamai?

And have you ever thought about the challenges and pain points that you might have to face when using Akamai’s solutions?

These are the questions that have been floating in my mind for a while and I will try to address them from a technical perspective throughout the series of blog posts.

The series of blog posts will cover the basics of how to deliver a Website or Application using Akamai as a CDN infrastructure, how to use specific features of capabilities to deliver better performance, what tools to use for measuring and analysing Website/Application performance, the challenges faced during the different implementation processes, tips and other further analysis.

My name is Jonathan Carvalho – I am a Solutions Engineer at Akamai – and this is the first blog of Your Application at the Edge.

Motivation

I’ve joined Akamai in 2017 as a Solution Engineer and I had to complete a bunch of career-specific training courses and get my certifications so I could be fully up to speed to help customers. Most of the training courses were done through an internal e-learning platform in which I had to learn about Internet and Web2 technologies, the Akamai CDN platform, products and features.

That’s great, but people have different learning styles and for me, rather than sitting and watching videos, I like to put my hands on because I believe that’s the best way my brain retains knowledge.

Although the training provided me with some labs, I never actually had to go through the end-to-end workflow in which I had to create a Website or Application, onboard it into Akamai, play with the solutions and try to improve the performance, reliability, and security of a Website.

That’s the reason why I am getting my hands dirty while facing the challenges of deploying a Website/Application over the Internet. The result? A series of blog posts for sharing my knowledge and thoughts with you all.

Who Is This Content For?

I will try to make the content useful for many readers.

Firstly, Solutions Engineers (both beginners and experienced) will find explanations about the end-to-end deployment workflow of a Website or Application into Akamai. They will get a glimpse of how to do that through the Akamai Control Centre, and how to use the right tools to analyse the Website/Application performance.

Secondly, Akamai users who are looking to deploy and secure their Website and Application by using Akamai solutions.

Finally, readers who already have depth knowledge about the above topics but want to do a refresher.

I hope the content will fulfil your expectations.

How To Create Your Website

For the purpose of this current series of blog posts, I’ve downloaded a free template from Free CSS and I’ve changed it to meet my requirements.

In my case, it is a one-page Website which had a static HTML page, CCS files, and a bunch of JavaScript.

I’ve added some text, images and videos to be I’ve used Brackets, a modern open-source code editor that understands web design. Brackets allowed me to easily create the HTML page, CSS style sheets and JS by using the Quick Edit and Live Preview.

You can download the last version here.

What’s next?

In “Your Application At The Edge [S01E02]” I will cover the following topics:

How to create a NetStorage Group – a cloud-based storage solution for storing static content. How to upload content to NetStorage using FileZilla. How to use the Akamai CDN by creating an Akamai Delivery Property.