The first-ever Akamai EdgeWorkers Coding Challenge gave participants the opportunity to harness the power and potential of serverless computing using the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform. Winning developer teams built functions using Akamai EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV products that ranged from DNS acceleration and cost-reducing traffic efficiencies to personalized experiences for news and cloud gaming. 

The team from first-place winner iQIYI used EdgeWorkers to deploy Edge DNS over HTTPS (DoH) as close to the end user as possible. The China-based streaming service realized a 40% reduction in DNS resolution times across the 87 worldwide locations in which the service was implemented.

“iQIYI developed a solution that can significantly accelerate our DoH service while also protecting the back against overloads. The combination of capabilities helps improve the overall stability of iQIYI’s DoH service,” said Mr. Jianhua Qin, Senior Director of Infrastructure and Intelligent Content Distribution Business Group (IIG), iQIYI. “Using Akamai EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV, we deployed code to more than 100,000 edge nodes globally in a matter of minutes and are able to synchronize data in just seconds.”

Personalizing News, Reducing Computing Costs, and Localizing Gameplay Experiences

Second place saw a striking tie between a 133-year-old news organization and a five-year-old blockchain company. Malayala Manorama, an Indian newspaper that was first published in 1888, set up logic to help ensure readers don’t miss anything in the dynamic list of Editor’s Choice articles on its home page. Using EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV, the lightweight capability can track user article visits without changes to original website components and data with no additional server load.

ICONLOOP, a Korean blockchain company founded in 2016, developed a function for blockchain routing with request validation. The scalable code uses EdgeWorkers to validate and provide optimal routing based on block height in order to reduce the load on origin servers in distributed environments. In doing so, ICONLOOP was able to reduce cloud computing costs by reducing unnecessary traffic.

An online games publisher based in India took third place with its localized cloud gaming experiences. The team used EdgeWorkers for geolocation capabilities to deliver gameplay environments that are native to the end users’ regions. Features like stadiums, monuments, street names, license plates, and even different sounds can be tailored to the location of the individual players.

The first EdgeWorkers Coding Challenge featured developer teams from current Akamai customers in Australia, China, Korea, and India. Participants were invited to use Akamai’s EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV serverless computing solutions to develop custom use cases and deploy them on the Akamai platform. A panel of judges evaluated the entries based on innovation, product feature utilization, functionality/working use-case, and potential business impact.

Be on the lookout for announcements about upcoming code challenges in other regions. Interested customers can also contact their account managers. For more information about EdgeWorkers, EdgeKV, and other Akamai edge compute solutions, visit https://www.akamai.com/solutions/edge.