What a year 2022 has been for the planet, for Edge and distributed Application Landscape, and for Section.
As we emerge from the post-Covid shadows and embrace a slightly tilted financial environment following the events in Ukraine, there still seems to be no slowdown in the global interest in leveraging distributed compute and networking to deliver new and/or superior user experiences. Telcos, ISPs, CDNs, Hyperscalers, and Mid Tier hosting are all working up and working on their offerings to support application use cases for application distribution.
At Section, we have had a year of bringing to a head, the technology build-out that we have been working on for the last few years and we are thrilled to expose our open, industry-leading, cost-optimized application distribution platform for general developer and operations team use.
Looking back over 2022, a few highlights of our year have included:
Customers
Recognizing the continued value delivered by the Section platform and team we were pleased to welcome all our new customers in 2022, help existing customers expand, and see all our major customers re-sign for additional term commitments to Section.
KEI Launch
Following the build of our Adaptive Edge Engine, we turned our attention to user interaction with that complex, massively distributed, and dynamic system. We wanted to provide an experience for users that felt like working with one static location and using toolsets that are open industry standards. We did not want to create an opinionated, closed platform.
Hence, our product and engineering team built and released this year, our Kubernetes Edge Interface (patent pending) which essentially presents our dynamic, distributed footprint as though it is one single Kubernetes cluster. We present a single Kubernetes API endpoint for each Project on Section which will address the user’s workload wherever it may be across the footprint at any time.
Digital Activation
As a final layer to opening up the ability for developers to move and manage workload super simply on the Section platform, we released our digital activation on-ramp which empowers any developer to deploy their containers and microservice applications to the Section global footprint in minutes.
While this outcome leverages all the underlying power of our distributed Kubernetes platform and devs can interact with the platform using all the standard Kubernetes tooling such as Kubernetes Dashboard or Kubectl, the on-ramp also delivers the opportunity to work with the distributed footprint where a user has zero prior knowledge of Kubernetes.
Additional Network / PoPs
Our ever-expanding network of locations this year included the addition of nearly 20 high-quality edge network locations from the Lumen Network which provides exceptional distribution and peering on its network. We also added the 11 Linode locations to the Section network. More to follow in 2023.
Distributed Application Landscape
Earlier this year we published a broader view of the players who participate in the Distributed Application Landscape. That is those providers who help organizations move their applications to some variant of distributed footprint (multi-region, multi-cloud, or Edge). We are still not happy with the nebulous concept of Edge given the lack of any clear “edge of the Internet”.
We prefer the concept of application distribution to describe what players are seeking to achieve and note that there are various levels of potential distribution possible. From just a few locations in a Hyperscaler or two through to on-prem or 5G distribution to thousands of locations. All are valid, relevant, and “could” be argued as Edge but all are clearly in the realm of application distribution.
Patent Issued
The Core of the Section platform we describe as our Adaptive Edge Engine. This takes care of all the complexities associated with orchestrating, moving, and managing workload and traffic across a dynamically cost-optimizing distributed footprint. We were pleased to have our patent issued for the “brains” of our AEE this year recognizing the originality of our approach to the large and very complex (but highly valuable) problem.
Compliance
In addition to continued compliance with PCI DSS audit requirements, this year, Section added SOC2 type 2 attestation demonstrating our continued commitment to Security and Reliability as cornerstones of our platform for our customers.
2nd DDoS Network
To further enhance Section’s reliability, this year we added a 2nd major DDoS scrubbing network to our platform. We now have dually redundant DDoS scrubbing networks powered by two of the largest capacity DDoS scrubbing networks on the Internet.
Eng Ed
A few years ago we launched our Engineering Education program to help Engineering students publish their articles and gain experience and exposure for their thought leadership pieces. This year, we reached close to 1 million views a month of our Eng Ed students’ content with the most popular article drawing over 25,000 views a month.
Our Eng Ed contributors have also reported successful job placements as a result of the work they have published as part of this global program.
Community
We continue to sponsor and support opensource projects and communities such as Varnish Cache, LF Edge, Linux Foundation, and the CNCF and we really enjoyed speaking at and participating in both Kubecon and Cloud Native Conferences in Europe and North America this year; what’s more, in person! So many great people in the community and the vast array of developing CNCF projects and surrounding proprietary offerings are fantastic.
Awards
It was pleasing to be recognized by partners, customers, and analysts this year, and receiving two awards (Frost and Sullivan’s Kubernetes Award for Product Innovation as well as the Intellyx Award for Digital Innovation was a thoroughly pleasant outcome for our team.
