During KubeCon in Salt Lake City 2024, we announced the availability of Akamai App Platform in public Beta. Since then, we’ve focused on reducing operational overhead for platform teams while continuing to deliver on our promise: enabling developers with a structured yet flexible environment to efficiently build, deploy, and manage containerized applications. Beta users may have noticed regular availability of new versions and patches – now announced directly within the App Platform web UI.
In this blog, we’ll shortly touch on App Platform’s new features and improvements, plus we’ll look ahead at some major changes that are in our pipeline.
Customizable Self-Service Catalog
Akamai App Platform offers a catalog that provides golden path templates (Helm charts) to development teams. These templates make it easy to deploy applications and to spin up supporting services like databases, key-value stores, and message queues. Platform admins can curate the catalog and use the RBAC model to decide which templates are available to their teams. Akamai App Platform also offers the option to add any public Helm chart to the Catalog by simply filling in the URL to a Chart.yaml. This also allows platform admins to add extra platform capabilities next to the already integrated capabilities to compose their ideal platform.
By offering the option to add public Helm charts to the Catalog, Akamai empowers platform teams to rapidly expand platform capabilities without custom development, which can significantly reduce time-to-market for new services.
Dedicated Team Workspaces for Continuous Integration
Although App Platform focuses more on Continuous Delivery (CD), it does come with some Continuous Integration (CI) features. Developers can register their code repositories and create container images using pre-configured Tekton pipelines with integrated Kaniko and Buildpack tasks. App Platform also comes with a self-hosted Git service. Each team is automatically onboarded to the Git service. A newly released feature creates an isolated space in the Git service and allows team members to create repositories. This offers onboarded teams a paved road to start building and deploying containerized applications within just a few minutes.
The Akamai App Platform isolates team environments with built-in CI capabilities, eliminating the need for separate tooling investments, allowing organizations to consolidate infrastructure costs while accelerating developer productivity.
Lifecycle Management
Maybe one of the most underestimated activities in Platform Engineering is dealing with the constant changes and life cycle management of used upstream open source Kubernetes projects. Akamai App Platform integrates around 30 upstream open source Kubernetes projects. While doing this manually requires a huge time investment just to test everything and keep things up to date. Using App Platform relieves platform teams from doing this themselves so they can focus on supporting their development teams. Since the Beta launch of App Platform, we have upgraded almost half of the integrated Kubernetes projects. The latest update was one to mitigate the 9.8 Critical Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities in Ingress NGINX. This fix was released just 2 days after the CVE 2025-1974 was announced.
By managing the complex update cycles of the 30+ integrated Kubernetes projects, Akamai frees your engineering resources from maintenance tasks, allowing them to focus on innovation while maintaining an enterprise-grade security posture.
GitOps-Based Secrets Management
In a recent release, the GitOps workflow for secrets has been drastically improved, allowing the creation of practically unlimited secrets. App Platform allows users to create secrets directly in the web portal and to use these secrets in their workflows. The secrets are encrypted using SealedSecrets and stored in the Git configuration repository, which are now directly deployed using Argo CD.
Akamai’s App Platform enhanced secrets workflow combines security best practices with operational efficiency, reducing the risk of configuration drift while enabling teams to manage sensitive information through familiar GitOps processes.
Practical Guides for Different Use Cases
App Platform allows you to customize your platform using the integrated open source upstream Kubernetes projects (like Harbor, Prometheus, Knative, and many more). Combined with the option for platform admins to add additional Helm chart templates to the Catalog, these new updates allow you to support practically every use case.
To support you in using App Platform, we created a few practical guides:
- Deploy an LLM for AI Inferencing: Learn how to install Kserve on App Platform running on an LKE cluster with GPU nodes, deploy the Meta Llama3 model using the Hugging Face (vLLM) serving runtime, and deploy a chatbot using Open-Webui.
- Deploy a RAG Pipeline and Chatbot: Expand on the AI inferencing guide above even more by installing Kubeflow Pipelines on App Platform and deploying a RAG pipeline to create a web chatbot that can respond to queries using your custom data set.
- Set Up Inter-Microservice Communication Using RabbitMQ: Learn how to build a Python chat application and send messages to all clients that are bound to a RabbitMQ fanout exchange.
- Use App Platform to Deploy WordPress with Persistent Volumes on LKE: A step-by-step instruction on how to deploy a WordPress site with a MySQL database.
What’s Next?
As we prepare for the general availability of the Akamai App Platform, you can expect added capabilities and improvements. We’ll soon launch an even more intuitive user experience with improved self-service forms. We also plan to further optimize our GitOps capabilities and improve scalability. This includes an architectural change to replace the current Tekton platform pipeline with an operator-based approach combined with App Platform-specific Custom Resources.
App Platform is a free service, publicly available to users via the Cloud Manager or API in all regions where LKE is supported. To try Akamai App Platform, go to the betas page in Cloud Manager to sign up.
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