Akamai, a global leader in cloud computing and content delivery, faced a critical challenge: ensuring a seamless, gradual migration from Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to Linode while maintaining service continuity, security, and cost efficiency. Traditional approaches such as service meshes like Istio had proven to be overly complex and cumbersome for their needs.

Challenge

The Akamai team needed a solution that could:

• Enable a gradual migration away from a cloud provider while ensuring seamless connectivity between clusters.
• Provide a transparent and developer-friendly experience, avoiding the need for extensive application-level changes.
• Offer cost-saving opportunities by enabling workload shifting in a controlled manner.
• Simplify multi-cloud connectivity and avoid reliance on static IPs or complex service mesh configurations.
• Address limitations with Istio in achieving transparent connectivity without manual interventions.

Solutions: Implementing KubeSlice

Akamai turned to KubeSlice, a cloud-native overlay network, for its ability to provide seamless multi-cloud connectivity. The team, led by Giuseppe Virzi and working closely with Avesha’s KubeSlice experts, embarked on deploying KubeSlice to connect their AKS clusters to Linode

Key Features Utilized

1. Seamless Connectivity: KubeSlice’s overlay network allowed services in AKS to communicate with those in Linode transparently.
2. Service Gateway: Enabled secure and efficient routing of traffic across cloud boundaries without needing external static IPs
3. Service Export & Import: Simplified the movement of workloads across clusters while preserving interconnectivity.
4. Namespace Isolation: Ensured that only specific services and namespaces were accessible within the slice.
5. Alias Mechanism: Allowed DNS name aliasing, ensuring seamless traffic redirection without requiring application code changes.

Implementation & Results

Akamai turned to KubeSlice, a cloud-native overlay network, for its ability to provide seamless multi-cloud connectivity. The team, led by Giuseppe Virzi and working closely with Avesha’s KubeSlice experts, embarked on deploying KubeSlice to connect their AKS clusters to Linode

Deployment Experience

1. Ease of Setup: Initially, Giuseppe was able to set up KubeSlice quickly with the  guidance of Avesha’s team.
2. Smooth Connectivity: Connecting Linode clusters with AKS was "flawless" compared to previous experiences with Istio.
3. Patches & Enhancements: While early patches were needed, the overall experience  proved promising.

Migration Benefits

1. Gradual Migration Capability: Unlike Istio, which required an all-or-nothing approach, KubeSlice enabled a step-by-step transition of services from Azure to Linode.
2. Cost Optimization: Allowed Akamai to offload workloads strategically to Linode,  reducing costs on their primary cloud provider.
3. Minimized Downtime: Enabled continuous operation while transitioning workloads,  similar to zero-downtime deployment principles.

Conclusion

By implementing KubeSlice, Akamai successfully enabled cost-effective, seamless, and gradual migration from Azure to Linode. The experience highlights KubeSlice’s potential as a developer-friendly, transparent, and highly scalable solution for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. As the project scales, Akamai expects to establish KubeSlice as a standard for all gradual migrations across their organization.