Akamai Technologies, an engineering-heavy company that delivers a sizable chunk of the Internet's total traffic every day, is generally inclined to solve its technology challenges in house. Corey Scobie, vice president for Open Platform at Akamai, summarizes the company's default engineering culture and philosophy as, simply, "We should built it."
But Akamai, a content delivery network based in Cambridge, Mass., took a different direction when it needed to assemble database infrastructure for an application programming interface (API) provisioning and management application. Scobie enjoined his team to use a database as a service (DBaaS) offering instead of building and running its own database.
