JS: Our current customers are pretty evenly split between those that need latency or throughput-based performance versus those who care about data sovereignty. But one thing to remember is that building performant infrastructure often unlocks a barrage of innovation that can then take advantage of that performance.Ĭan you describe some of the applications or use cases that have been deployed on Ridge? How important is low latency in those examples, compared to other benefits such as data control/sovereignty? We agree that those applications are not mainstream, yet. Also, some applications will need single-digit millisecond latency and will need to be at the cell tower. But there is a large and growing set of applications that require regional distribution to tens or hundreds of locations-and that is the problem that MoffetNathanson acknowledges exists and that Ridge is solving today with its distributed architecture and managed services. It’s true that some applications do fine running in a single location-say the East Coast of the US. We view the needs of applications as concentric rings of distribution and performance. This is an argument that is similar to one that was made by our partners at Databank almost two years ago in this blog post. They basically say that if you can be in a regional data center, you will be close enough to the end-user. JS: The MoffetNathanson critique is interesting. What’s your take on where the biggest opportunity for edge cloud services will be? MoffetNathanson offered up a critique of some of the proponents of ‘telco edge’ or ‘access edge’ computing, saying that most applications will be served well enough by regional data centers. These applications want to deploy globally on a managed container or a managed Kubernetes platform - that’s what Ridge lets them do. There is a growing need for infrastructure designed to support cloud-native, latency-sensitive applications. This partnership often creates the very first-of-its-kind PaaS offering in a market. We help those service providers by putting our modern, managed services layer on top of their existing IaaS platform offerings. We already have access to server resources in over 100 locations - and what is unique about Ridge is that we have obtained all of that by partnering with existing service providers. Jonathan Seelig (JS): We have built a global computing platform by partnering with service providers in lots of different places around the world. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.ĭescribe your plans for deploying edge infrastructure and how your approach is different from other edge cloud service providers? The fully managed Kubernetes service is powered by a global data center network of top-tier service providers for wide geographic distribution.Įdge Industry Review interviewed Jonathan Seelig to talk about how edge computing is evolving and the role Ridge aims to play in the market. Ridge is not a CDN, however instead, the company aims to offer a scalable edge cloud for cloud-native workloads for customers needing enhanced application performance and global data sovereignty.
That might sound like a tall order, but co-founder Jonathan Seelig has some experience in that area already: he also co-founded Akamai, a CDN service provider that was the first globally distributed compute platform. Ridge enables developers to seamlessly deploy and infinitely scale their applications and servers anywhere across the globe at the edge.
Now, as the global economy reawakens and executives assess their digital transformation efforts in 2021, edge computing is more often becoming a part of efforts to build resilient, high-performance digital systems, and Ridge is set to raise its profile in this fast-growing market. Ridge’s approach to edge services gained customer traction and funding over the course of 2020. Ridge has been building an edge computing platform that is optimized for Kubernetes-based architectures that are highly distributed and decentralized.