There are a few things that must be in place before onboarding your site. This includes setting up your ​Akamai​ contract with the products and services you need, getting your account and base components configured, and acquiring your CP codes for billing. You’ll also need an ​Akamai​ Cloud account so that you can provision and configure your site’s origin servers.

Get your ​Akamai​ contract

Work with your ​Akamai​ account team to determine the products and services you'll need, and get them added to your contract to use ​Akamai​ CDN services. Once your contract is active, your products and services can be configured in the ​Akamai Control Center​.

This tutorial uses ​Akamai​'s Ion solution to configure and deliver your site:

• Ion (via ​Akamai Control Center​). ​Akamai​’s Ion solution helps streamline and secure the delivery of your website or app. Ion comes with several other web-based interfaces you'll use for this process.

Initial components

Your account team sets up several base components you'll use to interact with the ​Akamai​ CDN, including:

1. Your contract's identifier. Your ​​Akamai​​ contract is assigned a unique identifier—its contract ID. You can get this from your account team after they create your contract.
2. A primary group for your contract. Use it to organize your objects—the things you'll create and use to deliver your content. This group is also assigned a unique identifier called a group ID. Make note of this value.
3. An Admin role for your primary group. This role grants permission to all products and services on your contract. Work with your account team to come up with a suitable name for this role.
4. A user for the Admin role. The user is associated with an email address and a password you choose. This tutorial refers to this as your primary admin user. Your primary admin user manages everything on your account, including other users.

See the diagram below for information on how components are structured and set up. The contract, primary group, Admin role, and primary admin user are all set up by your account team. You have the ability to set up, configure, and customize all other components to your liking.

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You can do more with components

You can use your primary admin user to perform all the CDN-related tasks covered in this tutorial. See our Deliver your first site tutorial for examples on other things you can do as the primary admin user in ​Akamai​’s Identity and Access Management tool.

CP codes

​Akamai​ uses content provider (CP) codes to track the use of CDN services. Your account team initially provides you with at least one of these codes. In this tutorial, you'll use it when you create an Ion delivery configuration.

A CP code is comprised of two parts:

• An integer value. This is a 5-7 digit value that ​Akamai​ generates.
• A unique alphanumeric name. You pick this value.

Set up an Akamai Cloud account

The next step in this tutorial involves creating multiple Linode compute instances in a high availability setup. Linodes are cloud-based, Linux virtual machines used to store your website and website assets so they can be accessed by clients. Collectively, the virtual machines act as origin servers from which the CDN pulls, and then caches, your site content.

If you don’t have one already, create and set up an ​Akamai​ Cloud account to get access to the necessary tools to provision your Linode instances. See our Create a cloud computing services account guide for instructions and best practices when setting up your account.

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Akamai Cloud accounts require billing information

Akamai Cloud accounts are self-service and require some form of billing on file—like credit card, PayPal, or Google Pay. Talk to your ​Akamai​ account team about other billing options. To add additional payment methods after your account is created, see our Manage payment methods guide.

Review your site

How much storage space does your site currently require? When you create your Linode instances, pick a plan with the necessary storage space to hold your site and all of its components.