CenturyLink Unleashes New CDN Platform

CenturyLink on Thursday unveiled its new content delivery network (CDN) platform designed to allow businesses to create responsive and more secure personalized web application experiences.

CenturyLink CDN Edge Compute provides developers with a flexible, open module architecture to design, configure and deploy custom web application workloads at the edge, the company said.

Garrett Gee, CenturyLink’s senior vice president of indirect sales, tells Channel Partners his company built its reputation in the CDN market by enabling top global broadcasters, OTT platforms and gaming companies to deliver high-performance video and game download customer experiences.

CenturyLink’s Garrett Gee

“Now with CDN Edge Compute, CenturyLink is offering channel partners the opportunity to enable all types of customers to deliver high-performing, dynamic web application and website experiences,” he said. “By expanding our product line to include CDN Edge Compute, CenturyLink channel partners can now address a much larger target market for content delivery and web security.”

Web application firewalls (WAFs), bot management and application performance modules run within milliseconds of the end user, removing bandwidth constraints between end and origin servers. CDN Edge Compute allows developers to move changes into production quickly while minimizing risk, according to CenturyLink.

CenturyLink’s Bill Wohnoutka

“CDN Edge Compute expands our content delivery capabilities and creates a competitive advantage for channel partners working with IT organizations who manage mission-critical web applications and websites,” said Bill Wohnoutka, CenturyLink’s vice president of global internet and content delivery services. “Because CDN Edge Compute is an open module edge platform, businesses can utilize a wide range of industry leading software tools and even incorporate their own proprietary software into the edge-delivery nodes. This allows developers to create a completely customized environment that meets their innovation needs and eases the process for pushing new web content and capabilities to users.”

CDN Edge Compute is powered by technology from Section. Its edge compute platform allows development and operations engineers to run compute workloads on a distributed edge.

CenturyLink began working with Section this year to further strengthen its content delivery capabilities, Wohnoutka said.

“Providing engineers with access to and control of workloads at the edge helps power a better internet by reducing latency and data backhaul, and maintaining a strong security perimeter,” said Stewart McGrath, Section’s CEO. “We are excited to work with CenturyLink to unlock the wealth of compute power available within massive scale networks.”