In case it wasn’t obvious by now, AWS is going after Akamai with their latest release of: Amazon Route 53 Adds Elastic Load Balancer Integration for DNS Failover

This fills a long-standing gap in the ability for companies to take advantage of true GSLB/GTM capabilities for high availability. Previously, they closest you could get would be to instrument Route53 to use latency based DNS, but it wasn’t well suited for building highly redundant active/active applications, generally forcing teams to either choose between that level of redundancy, going to Akamai and signing up for their GTM services, or implementing their own with something like F5’s GTM solution (though the latter generally only available to enterprises with multiple datacenters already.)

AWS’s CloudFront is already a compelling offering in the CDN space, so as AWS chips away at Akamai, I wonder what will be next? My hope is something along the lines of Kona, but more likely will be something like application acceleration.