Akamai Web Performance study guide
Akamai Web Performance · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Akamai Web Performance exam is a multiple-choice certification-style assessment aimed at web operations engineers, front-end and performance engineers, DevOps and SRE staff, and technical architects who configure and tune content delivery on the Akamai platform. It tests whether you can reason about how a CDN actually behaves, not just recite product names. The Akamai Web Performance study guide has 6 sections and about 1,763 words.
01Web Performance Fundamentals and CDN Concepts
A content delivery network reduces latency by terminating client connections at an edge server close to the user, then using optimized long-haul paths back to origin. Understand the split: the edge-to-user leg is dominated by RTT, TCP/TLS handshake rounds, and last-mile bandwidth; the edge-to-origin leg is where cache hit ratio and mid-mile routing matter most.
344 words, about 2 min02Akamai Platform Configuration and Property Management
Akamai configuration is organized around properties (a named set of rules for a hostname/path space), rule trees (ordered match criteria with behaviors), and behaviors that implement features. A property is versioned; changes are made in a new version, validated, then activated on a staging or production network.
289 words, about 1 min03Caching and Content Delivery Optimization
Edge caching decisions depend on cacheability (method, status code, response headers) and freshness (TTL from Cache-Control/Expires, or heuristic/default TTLs). Key headers: Cache-Control ( max-age , s-maxage , no-cache , no-store , private , public ), Expires , ETag / Last-Modified , Vary , and Age .
299 words, about 1 min04Front-End and Edge Performance Optimization
Front-end performance is dominated by critical rendering path work: HTML parsing, CSS blocking render, and synchronous JavaScript blocking the parser. Techniques: defer/non-blocking scripts, inlining critical CSS, preloading key resources ( preload , preconnect , dns-prefetch ), and lazy-loading below-the-fold images.
283 words, about 1 min05Performance Measurement, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting
Separate synthetic (lab, controlled, repeatable) from real user monitoring (field, real conditions, variable). Core Web Vitals - LCP, INP, CLS - are field metrics judged at the 75th percentile.
285 words, about 1 min06Security, Reliability, and Operational Best Practices
Edge security includes TLS best practices (modern ciphers, HSTS, certificate lifecycle management), WAF rules, bot mitigation, rate limiting, and DDoS absorption by the distributed network. Understand origin protection : do not expose origin directly; restrict origin access to edge IPs or use authenticated origin pulls so attackers cannot bypass the CDN.
263 words, about 1 min