Startup IT Infrastructure: Precisely Cloudflare + Akamai Cloud

Through a certain connection, I ended up helping with the system development and operation for a new business, so I researched the optimal infrastructure configuration.

Prerequisites

Infrastructure costs should be kept low

The client wants to minimize system construction and operation costs while ensuring scalability as the business grows. AWS, Azure, and GCP are too expensive, so I considered a low-cost solution with managed DBs and decent security.

Service configuration is Rails + PostgreSQL

The application uses Rails. The database is PostgreSQL, but we’ll use a managed service for business purposes.

Configuration

Frontend is Cloudflare

Cloudflare is used for the service frontend. Domain registration costs around a few thousand yen annually, but R2, CDN, and WAF are free for our scale.

IaaS seems to be Akamai

Initially, I considered DigitalOcean, but it lacks a Japan region, with the closest being Singapore. Web service speed is critical, and after some research, I found Akamai offers affordable IaaS. It acquired Linode previously.

Computing pricing is as follows. It’s cheap.

For now, the 2GB model should suffice.

Managed PostgreSQL service pricing is as follows

For now, the 2GB plan should suffice.

VPC is free. That’s helpful.

CDN and object storage use Cloudflare instead of Akamai because they’re free.

Selected region is jp-tyo-3

Akamai has three Japan regions, but if there’s no specific preference, jp-tyo-3 seems best. ap-northeast is also Tokyo but reportedly older. jp-tyo-3 supports VPC and Premium CPU Instance, making it better.

There’s also Osaka (jp-osa), and the differences are as follows:

Item	Tokyo	Osaka
Select Region	Tokyo Expansion jp-tyo-3	Osaka jp-osa
Region Type	Core Compute	Core Compute
New Deployments	Full availability	Full availability
VM & Shared CPU	Supported	Supported
Managed PostgreSQL	Supported	Supported
VPC	Supported & Free	Supported & Free
Cloud Firewall	Supported	Supported
Block Storage & Backup	Supported	Supported
Object Storage	Next-gen E3 & Standard	Old-gen E1 & Limited Availability
Hardware	Relatively new	Typical Core Region

There’s a clear difference in Object Storage

If storing images, attachments, or backups in Object Storage, Tokyo is currently more advantageous.

Tokyo 3: Standard E3 endpoint
Osaka: Old-gen E1 endpoint with Limited Availability

Akamai considers E2/E3 as the latest standard endpoints, and new features or performance improvements are generally introduced to E2/E3. Osaka’s Object Storage may require a support application to use.
However, if you don’t use object storage (or use another service like Cloudflare R2), either region would work.

Monthly cost is 7,000 yen

Excluding domain fees:

Resource	Monthly	Annual
2GB Compute Instance	$12	$144
Managed PostgreSQL 2GB・1 Node	$32	$384
Total	$44	$528

Monthly: Approximately 7,142 yen
Annual: Approximately 85,706 yen

It’s under 10,000 yen, so it seems acceptable. We’ll see how stable it is and what the backup situation looks like.