New features:

• Support for EdgeWorkers with AMD. Typically, you use Akamai Control Center and the Property Manager application to configure behaviors to optimize delivery. EdgeWorkers helps you do this by deploying JavaScript functions at the edge, instead. See the AMD user documentation for more details on EdgeWorkers and how to add it to your AMD configuration.

New features:

Enhanced Proxy Detection (EPD)

EPD enforces content rights management by blocking access to requests from malicious or anonymous VPNs and proxies. Akamai has collaborated with GeoGuard, a third-party agent which provides the categorized IP dataset, to provide our EPD solution. With this release, EPD has reached general availability status and several new features have been added. Complete details on the use of EPD and these new features can be found in the AMD user documentation.

• Support for the Hosting Provider category. GeoGuard offers several categories of protection. Until this release, we didn’t support their “is_hosting_provider” category. This captures IP addresses associated with Cloud and CDN providers. This brought up concerns that Akamai-specific IP addresses may be included if this category was applied. This has been addressed with this release. This category is considered optional and it’s available with Advanced set as your Configuration Mode.
• Header Enrichment. This lets you include the “Akamai-EPD” header in requests to your origin. It tells you if a connecting IP address in a request is associated with an anonymous proxy. This can be especially helpful if you need to check the requester before providing access to your content.
• IPv6 support. We’ve extended the EPD functionality for IPv6 addresses, too. We’ve included best practices and support mitigation actions for all of GeoGuard’s EPD categories.

New feature:

• Reports for Enhanced Proxy Detection (EPD) with GeoGuard. The Media Delivery Reports component in Akamai Control Center now offers the Proxy Protection tab in Historical reports. Use it to monitor how often EPD was applied to requests that were routed through a proxy. We’ve worked with our partner, GeoGuard to establish several “categories” of proxy for this detection (“Anonymous VPN,” “TOR Exit Nodes,” etc.). The reports show you how often a selected action (allow, deny, or redirect) was applied, either for all proxy requests or per individual, GeoGuard proxy category. The reports also show proxy-related request data per individual CP code, so you can review results data per individual property configuration. You can also filter data based on traffic specifics, including secure delivery, non-secure delivery, live content, video on demand content, HLS, and DASH formats. See the Media Delivery Reports User Guide for more details.

New features:

• Manifest Personalization (“MPer”) for DASH. With the increasing demand for online content, you may be challenged to deliver even more when network and bandwidth capacity are limited. To help, you can include MPer with AMD to limit or restrict the maximum bit rate for DASH content served to your customers. See the Adaptive Media Delivery Implementation Guide for details.

New Feature: 

• Quick Retry: Quick retry detects slow forward throughput while fetching a streaming media object and attempts a different forward connection path to try to avoid congestion. This behavior is added automatically to any new AMD property and is available for addition to an existing one. For complete details on how to configure Quick Retry, see the AMD - Implementation Guide.

Enhancement:

• Selective application of “SameSite” cookie attributes.  We recently enhanced the AMD Cookie-based Token Authentication functionality to maintain compatibility with Google’s updates to their SameSite Cookie attribute, with Chrome version 80 and later. With this new change, Akamai is more selective when explicitly setting the “SameSite=None” and “Secure” attributes for token cookies. Akamai identifies cross-site requests by looking for the presence of the “Origin” header and sets the “SameSite=None” and “Secure” attributes only if this request header is present.

Enhancement:

• Support for Google Chrome’s changes regarding “SameSite” cookie attributes.  We’ve enhanced the AMD Cookie-based Token Authentication functionality to maintain compatibility with Google’s updates to their SameSite Cookie attribute with Chrome version 80 and later. With this change, Akamai explicitly sets the SameSite attribute for token cookies to use the values “None” and “Secure.” This allows the applicable cookie token to be sent to Akamai without playback interruption when using Chrome. For non-secure (HTTP) traffic, there is no change to how the session token is set in a cookie.

Bug Fix:

Chunked Transfer Encoding for Uncompressed content requests: With this release, we fixed an issue that caused playback issues with any device that requested uncompressed content, typically manifests and text subtitle files larger than 32 KB in size. This content is now delivered using chunked transfer encoding to clients which prevents playback issues. You might have experienced this issue if all the following conditions existed:

• Your AMD property configuration was created or modified after November 8th, 2019.
• Video on Demand (VOD) is the configured delivery mode.

For more information, contact your Akamai account representative.

New Features:

• Origin Failover for AMD: This lets you configure an Origin Failure Recovery Policy for AMD to recognize certain errors and connection timeout situations as failure scenarios. You also configure associated Origin Failure Recovery Methods to address the different failure scenarios. A recovery method can either redirect a failed request to a backup origin or return a custom HTTP status code to the end-user. Origin Failover use is covered in the AMD - Implementation Guide.
• Mixed Mode Configuration for AMD: This lets you apply the various use case-based behaviors (Client Characteristics, Content Characteristics, Origin Characteristics, and Segmented Media Delivery Mode) outside the default rule in an AMD property configuration. This way, you can define different match criteria for different instances of these behaviors, in order to optimize delivery for unique use cases. Instructions on its use are covered in Mixed Mode Configuration for AMD.

Enhancements:

• Support for Origin-assist Prefetching for Azure URLs: We have incorporated metadata changes to support Azure URLs for HLS and DASH format media. Currently, CMAF format manifests and manifests that have KEY frames are not supported. (A DOS does not occur for these formats, they are just not supported. Content is still fetched, just not in prefetch mode.)

New features:

• Edge IP Binding Traffic Separation. You can enable ASN-based splitting of customer traffic for Edge IP Bound targets. Work with your Akamai representative to incorporate the creation of a Global Traffic Management (GTM) property as part of your configuration workflow to send only zone rate balancing (ZRB) autonomous system numbers (ASN) to the BRAVE network to prevent an increase to latency for non-ZRB traffic.