At one point during Tsinovoi’s tenure at Akamai, the decision was made to freeze all network development for a full year after Akamai experienced multiple outages in a single quarter. The engineering team had capacity to innovate, but the risk of any change outweighed potential benefits, he recalled.
Cloudflare has also suffered its share of recent outages including a firewall incident in December. The pattern is consistent: CDN providers that bundle infrastructure with rapidly evolving application services create fragility in the foundational layer that must remain stable. Tsinovoi said that he has had daily customer conversations about redundancy requirements since Cloudflare’s December outage.
“We must go and have a redundancy edge. We cannot continue to rely on a single vendor anymore,” he said, characterizing the current customer sentiment.
How IO River’s multi-edge platform works
IO River doesn’t have its own CDN or edge infrastructure. Rather, the platform creates a virtual layer that sits above heterogeneous CDN infrastructure as a sort of overlay.
The architecture addresses a fundamental compatibility problem: Edge platforms from Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly all use different underlying runtime environments. Code written for Fastly won’t necessarily execute on Cloudflare without modification.
The IO River platform leverages WebAssembly and JavaScript as the execution layer on edge networks. Customers write microservices once in JavaScript or WebAssembly. IO River’s virtualization layer handles the runtime environment differences and distributes that code across multiple edge platforms.
