Letter From Ridge Co-Founder

I’ve worked in infrastructure businesses for over 25 years. My first job out of college was at ECI Telecom where we made equipment that expanded the capacity of long-distance phone lines. We could take a line that was designed to hold 30 calls going between Europe and North America and expand it to carry 240 calls. I loved knowing that our technology meant that so many more people could communicate, collaborate, and connect.

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In 1997, as a graduate student at MIT, I co-founded Akamai Technologies. We looked at the way that content owners architected their web infrastructure and we came up with a better way. We saw racks and racks of servers that websites needed to buy, maintain, and operate. And we offered them an alternative — the world’s first Content Delivery Network (CDN). Content owners were all of a sudden given levels of performance, scalability, and reliability that they had never imagined – and we reduced the operational complexity of managing their sites. Again, I loved knowing that our technology was allowing so many more people to experience the web at its fullest and so many more content providers to get their message out there.

What is Ridge Cloud?

Ridge was founded 2 years ago. We saw a whole new set of applications being developed – and it was clear that the infrastructure market was not going to meet their needs. Applications that care about latency or specific geographies were struggling to deploy effectively. Everything from cloud gaming, to drones, to autonomous devices, to real-time AI applications were being developed as cloud-native applications with the assumption that there would be low latency infrastructure to support them. If you wrote an application that needed to be very close to end-users, you imagined that the existing cloud players could handle that task for you. Unfortunately, the hyper-scale cloud providers each have a full-fledged presence in 20-25 geographies. By comparison, Akamai’s CDN is deployed across 1,500 locations in 150 countries. In the same way, as websites rely on global distribution to gain performance, modern applications won’t scale if they are deployed in a single cloud region or in a single cloud. That’s why we built Ridge Cloud.

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Ridge Cloud is global, massively distributed, standards-based, and has built-in collaboration with the best data center operators in the world. From Argentina to Zimbabwe, there are Ridge Cloud regions available for you to run cloud-native applications. Not widgets, serverless functions, or Javascript – but full-fledged, cloud-native architectures: applications sitting on managed services running on Kubernetes, object storage, and managed databases. We have partnered with dozens of fantastic data center operators in nearly 100 locations so that you don’t have to. As we say at Ridge, “One API to rule them all” – we make it simple, scalable, and affordable for you to run your application anywhere.

The Future Of Modern Businesses

The Netflixes, YouTubes, and Fortnites of the world would not have been possible without distributed infrastructure. We believe that Ridge will enable a similar level of innovation with a  massively distributed cloud infrastructure that allows a new generation of exciting, world changing applications to be built. I feel enormously fortunate to have a front-row seat as we watch infrastructure change the world, yet again.

I’d love to hear from you and to have Ridge support whatever you are trying to build and deploy. Drop me a line and let me know how you see the future.