If you’ve been following along with Harper, you may be aware of our rapidly expanding partnership with Akamai. Together, we are bringing cost efficient solutions to enterprise customers that increase application performance and reliability while decreasing latency. Just as Akamai made the global distribution of static assets easy with CDN, Harper is doing the same for applications and the data that power them. The joint solution is ideal for industries where low latency application experiences at scale translate directly to higher revenue.
Harper is a distributed systems platform that combines ultra-fast data storage, caching, application, and streaming systems into a single technology. This innovative approach to backend systems makes it easy to deploy highly distributed low latency services, even with demanding requirements. With everything you need in a single package, deploying services across infrastructure providers and at the edge of your network becomes simple and cost effective.
As Harper’s CEO, Stephen Goldberg, mentioned in an interview, Akamai’s focus on the customer and solving their complex problems has been the foundation of a great partnership, and the joint solution is now delivering massive reductions in latency and cost.
In a recent webinar, Harper’s Field CTO, Jaxon Repp, talked about how combining this massively distributed data platform with an application layer on top of it allows organizations to really do anything. Harper sits behind Akamai’s existing services to enhance customization, flexibility, resource efficiency, and replication guarantees. By augmenting Akamai’s existing solutions with the exact same interface, the customer can improve functionality and scalability without doing any extra work.
From a business perspective, the technologies together reduce egress charges and scale horizontally to increase capacity in a linear cost-to-capacity ratio. Costs associated with scaling applications on Akamai Connected Cloud are more in line with traditional CDN fees, making it much more cost-effective than hyperscaler clouds. Essentially, Harper has become a CDN for applications and the data that powers them, while distributing to the edge and utilizing existing infrastructure.
Use Cases That Span Industries
Harper’s pub/sub-based data replication delivers globally-synchronized operations across an unlimited number of geo-distributed servers. This enables low latency service fabrics to be delivered at scale and in a fraction of the time compared to traditional application stacks. Combining multiple enterprise-grade services into a single platform also uses significantly less memory, saving customers money and complexity. A few industries where Harper + Akamai are making the biggest impact include:
Gaming
Gamers expect always-up gaming experiences and instant updates to data such as entitlements, profiles, and user sessions. Users are spread across the globe, making network latency a challenge that must be considered. Harper is a uniquely powerful technology for gaming as every service node is fully capable of fulfilling requests without additional systems. The more geo-distributed nodes you have, the more resilient your entire system is, making a system-wide outage borderline impossible at scale. Because nodes are designed for geo-distribution, every global player has minimal network latency between them and the nearest data-infused service node.
One large gaming customer was battling high latency and cost. Their existing solution was slow and vertically scaled, with a high risk due to a single point of failure. Harper set up a multi-node edge cluster, and proved that we could save 90% on infrastructure spend while improving latency. Organizations can reduce latency and cost by replicating data to Harper across a global cluster and geo-routing requests through Akamai + Harper. You can see more Gaming use cases here
Steaming Media
Harper + Akamai is ideal for media customers looking to improve their UI, block bad actors, and/or reduce cloud egress charges. Organizations can launch services faster by utilizing built-in HTTP, WebSocket, and MQTT interfaces to enhance instant access to multi-user functionality, personalization, and analytics. This includes real-time communication and data processing for use cases related to sports scores, IoT, transportation, and more.
One global streaming customer was looking to improve user experience and reduce compute costs. They quickly migrated to Harper on Akamai Connected Cloud with minimal lift, and reduced latency by 68%. You can see more Streaming Media use cases here.
Retail / E-Commerce
We are seeing a lot of digital commerce companies focused on improving app performance, SEO, and customer experience, especially as we approach the holiday season. Harper and Akamai are enabling use cases around real-time inventory, POS, fraud prevention, and analytics, while increasing origin offload. We recently helped accelerate page load times for one of Akamai’s largest retail customers, you can see the see anonymized long-tail cache case study here.
Worried about cost efficiency? Vertically scaling your data infrastructure to meet holiday demand is cost-intensive and does little to improve Core Web Vital/SEO ranking. Harper’s Commerce Optimization Suite enables use cases around:
* Long-Tail Origin Offload
* Early Hints
* SEO Bot Page Caching
* Smart Redirects
Harper’s horizontally-distributed application platform works seamlessly with Akamai’s Security and CDN products, and its component-based architecture means customers can deploy only the pieces they need, and do so in days, not weeks or months. Harper represents a cost-efficient alternative to ever-increasing Hyperscaler resource and egress charges, and our Commerce Optimization Suite is a proven solution for helping Akamai customers deliver better user experiences.
Other Resources
There are many more resources out there, but the best path is to reach out to our team! We’d love to answer questions to determine if this technology could be a fit or help architect a solution. Reach out to hello@harperdb.io anytime.
In the meantime, developers can follow along with this tutorial to deploy Harper and Akamai Connected Cloud for faster API performance. You can listen to this podcast about how the two companies are working together, or learn about how to cache the uncachable.
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