Downtime hurts. A single regional outage, a congested network or simply a server that runs out of breath can cause havoc all over the world. This frustrates the user, and costs companies money. Today, users want applications to be resilient, fast and snappy, irrespective of where they log in from. However, it is not so simple to keep things smooth especially when the applications are dispersed across different regions and clouds. Companies require a method whereby when one location is knocked out, traffic will be redirected to another location--without engineers having to rush to work in the middle of the night.


That’s where tools like Akamai Global Traffic Management (GTM) steps in. GTM acts like a traffic cop on the internet highway, sending users to the closest and healthiest backend. It keeps checking if endpoints are alive, reroutes traffic when stuff breaks, and balances loads across regions. Whether you’re in one cloud, juggling multiple clouds, or running a hybrid setup, GTM makes sure apps stay fast and available.


By mixing DNS-based routing, health checks, failover rules, and smart traffic balancing, GTM takes the manual mess out of multi-region load balancing. The payoff? Fewer outages, lower lag, and happier users—no matter where they connect from.


What is Akamai GTM ?

Akamai Global Traffic Management (GTM) is a DNS-based, cloud-native global server load balancing solution. It enhances the application reliability by pointing user to the appropriate data center based on the best Internet route. It offers several key benefits for organizations needing to route traffic across multiple cloud or on-premises environments.


Why Akamai GTM?

Akamai GTM offers several advantages over other load balancing solutions, primarily due to its global reach, intelligent routing, and features like improved availability, dynamic traffic distribution etc



Use Case Scenarios


Akamai GTM can reportedly be integrated into quite a number of systems but its really useful in certain scenarios like: 


Multi-Region Deployments

In case your application is in multiple regions (e.g. between GCP us-west1 and us-central1), GTM sends the users to the nearest healthy location. The system has the capability of switching one region to another region in case of breakdown in one region- traffic. 


Multi-Cloud Architectures

Many companies distribute workload across cloud platforms like Google cloud, AWS, and Azure. GTM gives a single means of balancing traffic across all of them, removing vendor lock-in and increasing reliability.


Disaster Recovery (DR)

Under the active-passive failover, one region continues to handle traffic and another is on standby. Should the primary region fail, GTM automatically switches traffic to the backup to ensure that downtime is minimal.


SaaS and Global Platforms

Apps that target users in multiple continents, such as SaaS tools or heavy content platforms, will also be able to take advantage of GTM by using geo-routing. It directs people to the nearest data centre to reduce latency.


A/B Testing and Stepped Rollouts

Using weighted routing, you will be able to route a small portion of traffic to a feature or environment. This implies safer rollouts and controlled experiments, and fewer surprises when things go live.


GTM Configurations to consider for Setting Up Load Balancing Rules


Liveness Tests

Akamai GTM (Global Traffic Management) uses liveness tests to monitor the health of each data center associated with a GTM property. These tests are performed by Akamai Web Agents, which periodically check if data centers are “alive” by running pre-configured tests such as HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, or ICMP (ping) against the targets. The results of these tests determine the liveness score for each data center; if a data center fails the test, GTM can automatically reroute traffic to healthy locations.


Failover and Fallback Delay

Each liveness test has a configurable timeout value. If the tests do not receive a response within this timeout, it is considered failure for that interval. Repeated timeouts causes the GTM to mark data center as down and it re-routes the traffic according to the Traffic Distribution settings. GTM can be configured with failover and fallback delays to prevent rapid flapping. These properties allow you to control how quickly GTM acts on liveness test results and how long it waits before restoring traffic after a recovery.


Property Type

Depending upon your application requirement, you can configure GTM to distribute traffic among your Google ALBs using one or more of the following methods:

  1. Weighted round robin: Assign weights to each backend application instance to control traffic split.
  2. Geographic routing: Route users to the nearest backend application instance based on their location.
  3. Failover: Enable health checks so GTM can detect endpoint availability in real time so that GTM can automatically reroute traffic if a backend application becomes unhealthy.


Create GTM Domain

Pre-requisites

  1. Deploy your application in the required regions.
  2. Ensure each application instance has a public IP configured. These IPs will be the targets for GTM routing.
  3. Below is a step-by-step guide on how to configure Akamai GTM to distribute traffic across different instances of an application. For this example, we will consider the application is hosted in GCP us-west1 and us-central1 locations.
  4. Step-by-Step instructions
  5. Log in to Akamai Control Center.
  6. Go to ☰ > DNS SOLUTIONS > Global Traffic Management. The Traffic Management Domains page opens.                                      GTM in Akamai Control Center
  7. Click Add New Domain.
  8. Select the contract from the menu for the domain. This field is visible if you have at least one contract.
  9. Fill in the Domain Name field that ends in .akadns.net. The fully qualified domain name (FQDN) field warns you if the domain name format is invalid.
  10. Enter this value in the text field e.g. test
  11. Enter a data center name and location e.g. us-west1 (The Latitude and Longitude fields should auto-populate
  12. Adding Data Center details
  13. Click "Add Another Data Center"
  14. Enter a data center name and location e.g. gcp-us-central1. Add Data Center information.
  15. Add Email Notification List and other information as applicable.
  17. Click Save. The New Property-Basic Info page appears.
  18. Enter the property name: testgtm-prop
  19. Select Property Type from the list. I am selecting “Weighted Random Load Balancing“ for this example.
  20. Enter information as below:
  21. Comments: GTM domain used to route traffic to backend.
  22. DNS TTL: (e.g. 60 seconds)
  23. IP Type: IPv4
  24. Leave Minimum Live Percentage blank.
  25. Use defaults for any other fields.
  26. Click Add To Change List & Next. The Traffic Targets page opens.
  27. Select the gcp-us-west1 datacenter from the drop-down menu.
  28. Servers: Enter the DNS record (A value) of the application (us-west1)
  29. Handout CNAME: Enter the DNS record (A value) of the application (us-west1)
  30. Click Add New Target
  31. Select the gcp-us-central1 datacenter from the drop-down menu and follow steps done for us-west1 gcp LB
  32. Click Set as Primary for the data center you want to make primary traffic target. You can also set Goal %age for the traffic you want to be routed to each Data Centers
  33. Click Add To Change List & Next. Review changes in the next few screens.
  34. Click Review Change List. The Change List Detail dialog opens.
  35. Review the Change List Detail dialog changes, validate them, add a required comment, and click Activate Domain to save them.
  36. Test and Monitor. We can use Akamai’s reporting and monitoring tools to observe traffic flow and verify correct routing.


Best Practices for Using Akamai GTM

Want GTM to work smooth? Here’s a few things worth keeping in mind:


Keep TTLs Low for Quick Failover

Set DNS Time-to-Live around 30–60 seconds. That way, when something breaks, clients pick up the change fast.


Test Liveness Checks Beforehand

Try your HTTP/TCP/ICMP probes in staging first. A bad config could mark healthy servers as dead and reroute traffic for no reason.


Add Failover and Fallback Delays

Don’t let traffic bounce back and forth (flapping). Small delays keep things stable while still recovering quick.


Use Weighted Routing for Safer Rollouts

Send just a little traffic to new regions, services, or releases. If things break, the damage stays small.


Leverage Geo Routing for Speed

For apps where lag hurts (like SaaS or gaming), route users to the closest server. Makes them feel your app is faster.


Keep Monitoring On

Hook Akamai’s reports with tools like Google Cloud Monitoring or AWS CloudWatch. Watching traffic and failovers in real time helps you tune GTM better.


Conclusion

Global apps need to stay online, run fast, and survive outages. But old-school load balancers usually stick to one region or cloud. That leaves holes in reliability and the user experience.

That’s where global traffic management comes in. By using DNS routing, health checks, and smart failover, it keeps apps running across regions, clouds, and even hybrid setups.

The benefits are clear. Want disaster recovery? Multi-cloud freedom? Or just better speed for users around the world? Global load balancing covers it. Features like liveness tests, weighted routing, and geo-based traffic help apps stay online and responsive even when something breaks.

The main point: don’t wait until a crash forces you to care. Build resilience early. Put global traffic management in place so your apps match both your tech and business needs. That means fewer outages, smoother user experience, and confidence that you can grow worldwide.