John Bradshaw, Field CTO Cloud EMEA at Akamai, unpacks a counterintuitive principle for modern cloud strategy — plan your exit before you plan to start — and argues that core-and-edge architecture combined with strategic clarity on business goals is what keeps organisations cost-aware and free from vendor lock-in.
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John Bradshaw, Field CTO Cloud EMEA at Akamai, explains how cloud concentration risk has become a "clear and present danger" to modern enterprise, and how the shift from FinOps to ValueOps — engineering value through AI-driven insight — reframes cloud economics.
John Bradshaw argues that major cloud outages reveal design failures, not just technology failures, and explains how abstraction across multiple providers creates true resilience rather than dependency on a single cloud's availability guarantees.
John Bradshaw argues the economics of hyperscale AI models don't stack up for most enterprise use cases, and makes the case for domain-specific and small language models running closer to users — trading raw parameter count for cost efficiency, latency, and fit-for-purpose outcomes.
John Bradshaw examines how artificial intelligence is transforming cloud economics, driving a shift toward value-focused strategies and accelerating adoption of multi-cloud architectures as enterprises balance cost, performance, and vendor risk.
John Bradshaw challenges the assumption that cloud is inherently cost-effective, exploring how organisations can build cost-intelligent architectures and adopt the principle of planning an exit before committing to a cloud vendor.
John's October 2024 interview with TFiR on Akamai's Generalized Edge Compute (Gecko): where it had reached by then, and the phased rollout he described. The region counts in the conversation are the 2024 plan as it stood, not a current roadmap; managed containers and fleet management were the next waves he outlined.
John Bradshaw argues that edge computing transforms developer experience by letting programmers think of their workload as a fully distributed application — positioning larger components closer to end users and fundamentally changing how distributed systems are architected.
John's August 2024 interview with TFiR on the problems edge computing actually creates: distributed data gravity and workload orchestration. He argues the binding constraint is operator and developer experience rather than raw capacity, and sets out how Akamai approaches it.
John's August 2024 interview with TFiR on why latency is a partnership problem as much as an infrastructure one, with gaming as the worked example. He describes Akamai's position as an infrastructure provider whose traffic reaches consumers only through somebody else's product.
John's June 2024 interview with TFiR on Akamai's Generalized Edge Compute (Gecko) and the case for putting full compute, not just caching, close to users. The roadmap he previews — region count, managed containers, fleet management — is the 2024 plan as it stood at the time of recording.