Voices of Video
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Voices of Video
Akamai's Connected Cloud: 90% Cost Reduction for Video Processing
Akamai and NETINT have joined forces to create something revolutionary in cloud video processing. The partnership brings NETINT's Video Processing Units (VPUs) to Akamai's Connected Cloud, fundamentally changing the economics and performance of cloud-based video encoding.
Sarah Walter, Product Manager at Akamai, reveals how their Connected Cloud has evolved beyond traditional CDN services to offer a complete compute continuum with three tiers: core, distributed, and edge. This architecture allows media customers to deploy infrastructure strategically, placing resource-intensive workloads in the core while positioning other components closer to end users. Unlike hyperscalers who often compete with media companies through their own content initiatives, Akamai focuses exclusively on empowering their customers' success.
The performance advantages of NETINT's Quadra T1U VPUs are nothing short of remarkable. These purpose-built ASICs for video transcoding deliver 90-95% cost savings compared to CPU-based encoding on public cloud platforms. Mark Donnigan from NETINT shares how they initially had to downplay these figures in their marketing because "no one would believe" the true performance gains. A side-by-side demonstration shows the stark difference, with VPU transcoding completing in a fraction of the time required by CPU processing.
Early customer feedback confirms these impressive results. One live streaming provider achieved 30 concurrent live streams with a VPU-accelerated instance versus just 2-4 streams on comparable CPU infrastructure. Another video platform reported 4x greater stream density compared to Akamai's high-end CPU plans, which themselves are more cost-effective than traditional public cloud options.
Starting at just $280 per month or 42 cents per hour, these VPU plans provide dedicated resources with no performance compromises. The global deployment footprint already includes Los Angeles, Miami, Frankfurt, Chennai, and Melbourne, with more locations planned based on customer demand. The solution enables true hybrid cloud implementation with identical hardware both on-premises and in the cloud.
Join Akamai and NETINT at their NAB presentations to learn more about this groundbreaking technology and how it's transforming what's possible for media companies in the cloud. Your video workflows will never be the same.
Stay tuned for more in-depth insights on video technology, trends, and practical applications. Subscribe to Voices of Video: Inside the Tech for exclusive, hands-on knowledge from the experts. For more resources, visit Voices of Video.
voices of video voices of video.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:The voices of video voices of video well, welcome back to another super exciting episode of voices of and, if you've been watching, we are building up to NAB. Nab is now about three weeks away. If you are not planning to come to this year's NAB, find a way, because Las Vegas is booming with news. There are so many already pre-announcements and there's just a lot of buzz coming into this show. So with that, I have to say, I am so excited to be with our next guest, and I am talking today with Sarah Walter from Akamai. So first of all, I want to say, sarah, it's your first time on the show, welcome.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Thank you so much for having me, Mark. It's a pleasure to be here.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Well, it's awesome. Our two companies have been working together for a while. You and I are on calls quite frequently, so a lot going on, and we just are really excited for the innovations that we've come together to bring to the market, and that's what we're here to talk about. So you know why don't you introduce yourself, tell the listeners what you do at Akamai and let's jump right in to what we've been cooking up between our two companies.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Yeah, absolutely so. I've been with Akamai for about a year and a half as a product manager. I work on our connected cloud, specifically on our sort of infrastructure as a service side, working on many different computing products, and most recently I've had the pleasure to work on delivering NetInt VPUs on the cloud, which has been a lot of fun and a really unique challenge, since this is kind of the first time this has been done before.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:That's right, you know we're we're excited because, as the VPU ecosystem has been developing quite nicely, it's known, even if we can't disclose logos on our website. You know there's some very large, very important hyperscalers and media and entertainment companies that use NetEnt VPUs, but still it was until now sort of limited to the companies who hosted their own infrastructure, had the resources to, you know, deploy hardware in data centers and for everyone else who's basically operating on public cloud or, you know, maybe third-party services, they were sort of, you know, in a way, locked out of using VPUs simply because the hardware wasn't available. So I think a great place to start is why don't you talk about what Akamai is doing with the connected cloud and you know, and that'll lead perfectly into why you even chose to deploy VPUs and where the opportunity is.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Absolutely so. As you mentioned, mark, cloud computing is something relatively new to Akamai, which has kind of traditionally been thought of as a CDN provider. But recently, with the acquisition of Linode, we have started offering kind of a full continuum of compute and we think of our compute infrastructure as sort of having three tiers a core, distributed and edge, so you can design your custom deployment and leverage different types of locations and cloud computing services, and that allows you to scale your streaming application, increase your performance, deploy infrastructure as close to end users as possible for those hyper local events, and for now we've introduced VPUs as a part of our core infrastructure. I'll focus on that side a little bit specifically. And we find that the core is typically where the majority of our customers heavy duty or resource demanding infrastructure lives, but I could also see these expanding to distributed sites in the future.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Yeah, I like the fact that you know you're able, being a CDN, it's a very natural and a completely possible evolution to go from the core you know to, kind of you know, one ring out and then all the way to the edge. I think that's just super key because in traditional cloud infrastructures you're stuck in the core right and there's certainly workloads. That that's completely, you know, acceptable and that fits both from a technical, architectural and even a cost reason. But as the edge becomes more important, why not do your processing on the CDN? You know in the CDN you know where all your bits are being distributed and then eventually all the way at the edge. So I think that's really really important to point out there.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:I agree and I think that that speaks to the value really of having VPUs in the cloud generally. Traditionally and I think some of what drove us to really want to bring NetInt into the connected cloud was we kept hearing from our partners and our media customers that they were adopting NetInt VPUs on-prem, but in doing so that they were limited to their on-prem locations and they were looking for additional deployment options. We realized in those conversations that we had a ton of mutual customers between NetInt and Akamai and a really great opportunity to make VPUs available as an alternative deployment option for those customers and to just introduce them to our other customers who haven't had access in the past. And generally Akamai is unique in how we're able, I think, to make the cloud work better for our media customers.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:There's a long history there of kind of evolving with the media customers, first as a CDN provider and then into security and now with the cloud, and we're really looking to develop and build on that history as a CDN but to provide more of the sort of essential services and infrastructure that can serve media customers and allow them to really innovate and excel in the industry. And then kind of my favorite point of this is, unlike many of the hyperscalers, we're not competing with those customers. There's no Akamai Studios or any other business venture where we're looking to create content or host our own media streaming application. We're solely looking to do kind of what we do well and support the needs of our media customers and, as we've seen, the interest of companies like AWS begin to vary more and more over the years. We want to lean in on what's important to our core customers and, you know, support that ecosystem.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Yeah, I love it. It's a great partnership, perfect.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Really excited about it. Some of what really I think also appealed to us about the NetInt T1U and the Quadra cards in general were just. I mean, these are really great and dedicated for transcoding. We've seen so many endorsements from media customers specifically for these cards, for everything from their stream density to the performance improvements they've been able to achieve using NetInt and things like support for AV1 encoding that you know you just can't find in like a typical CPU-based transcoding environment.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Yeah, you know, if I can jump in here and just make a comment, you know there's a very natural progression when you bring a new architecture to market and for us that was ASICs, leveraging ASICs and then creating the category of VPU so video processing unit we had to go through a couple of years of quite intense scrutiny evaluation. These media customers that you're referencing some of them really put us through the ringer. In fact, really all of them did. Everybody has their own priorities as to what they care about, but, make no mistake, quality is front and center. They still need, you know, bit rate performance, you know compactness, so quality, but it, you know, really high bit rates also is not usable, and so we had to work very closely on that.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:And you know we're really happy to be joining, you know, with Akamai as a best of breed delivery platform. So, just as you know, we, you know, are very proud of our video quality and the fact that so much of the media and entertainment industry, you know, has put, so we say, their stamp of approval on it. But to then partner with the best of breed CDN so that that very high video quality is also delivered seamlessly, flawlessly to the user is just really you know it's what the market and the industry needs, because if you have one or the other, you know, then the consumer experience suffers. So we have both really excited about that.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:They really see. I think that focused development in what you see here right, the ability to do so much on the card itself with minimal offload is really the output of all of that dedicated development and research into transcoding and applying that into developing these ASICs. So I'm excited to share what will be available on the connected cloud for our customers to provision to provision. These are the actual plans that are currently available to our beta customers and will be made generally available as of March 31st. As you can see, we're currently offering three different sizes which have either one or two dedicated Quadra T1U VPUs attached to the VM. So these virtual machines range from 8 to 12 vCPU. They start at 16 gigabytes of RAM and our introductory plan starts at $280 per month, or only 42 cents per hour it's incredible, so I have to jump in here per hour.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:It's incredible, so I have to jump in here and I'm going to tell a little story. So it's no secret that dedicated hardware, particularly ASICs, are absolutely the highest performant, lowest cost way to do video intensive operations like encoding. So I think anybody who's worked in video for even three months fundamentally understands that. When we developed our first generation and then our second generation, quadra, which is what we're looking at here, we run all the benchmarks internally Right, and I actually had to had to argue a little bit with the team to not publish the real numbers. Now, you know, normally let's just be honest in technology, oftentimes numbers are sort of like the best cases published, because like, oh, up to 50%. Well, up to means like yeah, in very special cases, do you get whatever? That up to number is Most of the time it's lower is Most of the time it's lower.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:In our case, I had to argue that the market would not believe that we were 90 to 95% more cost effective. So I said, gang, even though this is real, we have all the data to prove it I'm going to say from a marketing perspective it's 80%. And of course the engineers are like what are you doing? Aren't you supposed to be marketing? Aren't you supposed to say up to 95%? I said no one will believe it.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:So this is a funny story. So if you compare this pricing right here to standard cloud, go pick your public cloud of choice whoever that may be there's only three, probably that you would look at, maybe there's four and you compare a per stream for, just, say, a 1080p30 live encode, hebc. Don't even worry about AV1, just HEBC. If you do AV1, the economics get really favorable. It turns out that this is about a 90% cost reduction on OpEx over public cloud. And guess what? Our initial modeling was 90% and I had to fight with the team and say we can't publish that, no one will believe us. So let's do 80%. And even then they're not going to believe us. But you know it's a little more plausible. So I have to give that little story because you know, when we saw your pricing, I reminded the team and everybody laughed and said, yeah, you're right, mark. And also guess what? It was 90%. And here Akamai is proving it. So well done.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:That about echoes what we're hearing from our customers as well, both in terms of performance and looking at the price performance.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. Well, this is just super disruptive and it's what the market needs right now. You know, I know that you're hearing this from customers. We hear it. Yes, Quality still matters. Yes, you know, you know, it's not that there's a, there's a complete you for consumer experience, for video quality, et cetera. But make no mistake, we are no longer in the era of we can pay whatever it takes to deliver a premium experience. That clearly is not the era that we're living in, and so the fact that, together, we're bringing 4K, we're bringing AV1, we're bringing HDR, we're bringing HEVC at a 90% cost reduction over the majority of the public cloud instances that are out there, that is truly disruptive, you know, and really unlocks new value.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:So this is our current deployment footprint. We have VPUs available for customers in our Los Angeles, miami, frankfurt, expansion, chennai, india and Melbourne Australia locations, and hopefully more locations coming soon. But we're really excited to have a real global footprint here with VPUs available for customers worldwide.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Yeah, our customers are excited about this too, and they can't wait for those blue dots to get filled in. It's the one thing about hardware is that hardware does take time to ship and then do the installation, so there is a process, but I know that you, akamai, are very focused on this rollout and expanding the footprint.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:And part of our intention is really to understand where customers need more and then to respond to that demand in turn.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:That's great. Yeah, well, let's see a demo.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Let's do it, yeah, so what I would like to show you is what this looks like in our Cloud Manager. Cloud Manager is our graphical user interface for the Akamai Connected Cloud, and now you can go directly into the UI and provision one of these plans, and I'm going to show you how to do that. So right now, los Angeles is one location where we have VPU plans available. So if you go and you navigate over to the accelerated tab, you'll see that our NetInt plans are there for provisioning. Currently these are marked at $0 a month, but that will change when we move to general availability at the end of the month and you'll, like I mentioned, you, have access to kind of all of that core Linode functionality. That includes things like VPCs, firewalls. You'll be able to configure it with your chosen distribution.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Very nice, you know, easy to configure. I like the user experience.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:We really want to make it as easy as possible for our customers. Of course you can provision a VPU also through the API and CLI, but just cloud management makes it so easy to go in and to configure and then monitor those resources.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:So easy, configure and then monitor those resources so easy. So I think one of the questions that I'm sure everyone has is is this a dedicated instance you know, like only to me, or is there other someone else's traffic that would also be shared on the same card, on the same server? Maybe you can comment about that.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:So the actual resources for the plan are 100% dedicated to the customer. That includes the virtual machine and the NetInt card or cards that are attached to that plan. The customer has direct access. The host or the server where that card is located may be shared among one or more guests, depending on the deployment numbers at that time.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Got it.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Got it OK. Generally speaking, customers should expect dedicated performance for these plans.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Sure, sure, and the smallest unit of payment is an hour, or you're not doing like sub, like minute billing or OK, so we start from an hourly billing start from start, from hourly.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:OK, I mean it. It those prices 68 cents an hour for a two card system. It's unbelievable, it's. We did the math, by the way, and um, it's roughly, uh, I don't remember now the exact number, but it's three years. That's what it translates to. If you were just to look at it on a per stream cost, now that's not an ABR ladder, that would be just a single, you know, single 1080p 30, but just for sake of you know discussion. You know because you know when you start talking about comparing HLS profiles and it gets real nuanced as to what the cost is. But around $550 for three years. It is incredible. And, by the way, that's AV1, hevc or H264. So that would include AV1. There's no increase in costs for the more advanced codec. That's right. It's amazing, it's just absolutely amazing.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Oh, I can't wait, let's look at a.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:You know so. I like fast cars, so what you're about to show us are fast CPUs.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Right, that's right, that's right. This is a little side-by-side test that we did internally, looking at a VOD transcoding example on a VPU versus a CPU and, as you can see, the VPU process is actually already completed. At some point, I think we'll just cut the demo, because this is going to keep going and going and going and, as you can see, the VPU process if you were leveraging a VPU you would be done.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Yeah, so for customers who are focused in just in time transcoding, I think this is their best option and we're really excited about having this as an available offering.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:It's a great demo and, by the way you know just to point out, I'm sure others caught this too that's H.264, which is the best case on CPU Right. So if we were to compare it with ATVC and then with AV1, it would be like watching paint dry.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Right, and it wouldn't have made for a very good demo.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, yeah, it's really really amazing. What else you know? Can you, can you give us some other insights into? We're in the beta phase now. Just as I think we said at the beginning or, you know, hinted at throughout, this video actually isn't going to be released until we're in GA. So some of the comments about this is the beta phase, you know, just a matter of like two weeks roughly and everything's going to be general availability. But I know that you know for the last roughly about six months, you know there's been a very nice base of media and entertainment customers who are beginning to build and you know who have been evaluating and you know many are using NetIt now but they're going to be migrating to Akamai. I'm just curious if you can share some insights as to what the early feedback where people are excited. You know if there's new services that are going to be unlocked as a result of this low cost and this availability on Akamai. What can you tell us?
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Yeah, we've gotten some really great initial feedback from those early participants. One live streaming solution provider actually shared that they found they could achieve 30 concurrent live streams with an accelerated instance, versus two or four, depending on settings concurrent live streams with their current preferred dedicated CPU infrastructure, and that speaks for itself. I'll add another one. A video sharing platform that we work with shared that they experienced four times greater stream density compared to using one of our dedicated 96 gigabyte CPU plants, which, by the way, are quite a bit more expensive than they're pretty, they're pricey, yeah, and yet I'm guessing that still it's much less than on the traditional public clouds.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Right, the CPU compute instance.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Correct so it just shows that these days you really need that workload specificity in your deployment. So if you're focused on transcoding, you need a plan that is really optimized for transcoding.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:That's right. Well, thank you for going through that information, showing us the demo. What are people going to see at NAB? I know you're going to be there and so first of all, I want to welcome the listeners and invite the listeners and make sure you go talk to Akamai Now. Akamai personnel will be in and out of the NetEnt booth. We're actually going to be in the Akamai booth, so there's going to be a lot of cross-pollination, but whether you come see us at NetInt and go to Akamai, you go to Akamai one way or the other. Come see us, but you know, sarah, what are you going to be talking to customers about. You know what can they see. Give a little sneak preview.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Yeah, I'm really looking forward to getting hands-on with some of our customers and understanding, I think, and really just trying to kind of help customers, maybe set up some initial deployments on the cloud. That's great streaming summit presentation planned as well with some of the leadership from Akamai and we're going to be talking about our VPU work with some of you know, I think the NetInt customers as well.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you for bringing that up, because for anybody who's attending streaming summit you'll definitely not want to miss. It's on the first day. In fact, it's right after Dan's keynote. He always kicks off Streaming Summit with a keynote, sort of a state of the industry, covers a lot of great statistics and data and information about where we're at in the industry. But right after that is a joint presentation with Akamai, with NetEnt and with a mutual customer, and it's a pretty cool use case that is going to be showcased. It's a unique use case in many regards, but it's going to show the true hybrid implementation.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:There's a lot of talk about the hybrid cloud and in theory, of course, it's sort of nirvana right, but often in practical execution it's really tough, especially with hardware, because you really need a duplication of the hardware you have on-premise or in your private data center and the hardware that's in the cloud. Well, now, for the first time that's at least if someone's using VPU that's possible you can get an exact duplication of the VPU in the cloud on Akamai that you might be running on-premise, and so that's going to be presented and talked about. So I think there's going to be, you know, presented and talked about. So I think there's gonna be a lot of interest, you know in.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:I mean, in addition to that real like hybrid cloud use case, I know a lot of our customers, our mutual customers, are really excited about having Akamai as an option for kind of burst capacity you know for those-based opportunities that today they haven't had the infrastructure to take advantage of.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Yeah, there is going to be so much news to cover between what our two companies are doing together. You know we already have some of these large customers who are, you know, have expressed interest in talking about what they're doing, but just need to get a little further down the road in their you know, in their implementations. But that's coming. So thank you for joining Voices of Video, sarah. It was really awesome to have you on.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Thank you for having me, Mark. It was a pleasure and I've really enjoyed working with the NetEnt team. I have to say, Awesome.
Mark Donnigan, NETINT:Well, we feel the same. So Akamai is a very important and valued partner. So, yeah, so, once more, if you are coming to NAB, make sure that you get a meeting with Akamai. Nab, make sure that you get a meeting with Akamai. Come see us, of course, but really go talk to the Akamai folks. You know, meet Sarah, meet the team, the rest of you know the key folks who are part of putting all this together. You know, in the product team and product management, product marketing, they're going to be there. So, you know, go get a meeting with them and you're definitely going to want to spend some time to learn more. And, you know, hopefully, adopt NetEd VPUs in your workflow running on Akamai. So, with that, we're three weeks away from NAB. Everybody travels safe and we hope to see you soon.
Sarah Walter, Akamai:Thank you so much again, Mark. Take care. This episode of Voices of Video is brought to you by NetInt Technologies. If you are looking for cutting-edge video encoding solutions, check out NetInt's products at netintcom.
