From reading that blog post it is not clear to me if their wrapping code existed prior to the discovery of the heartbleed bug: The post summary says:

Akamai patched the announced Heartbleed vulnerability prior to its public announcement. We, like all users of OpenSSL, could have exposed passwords or session cookies transiting our network from August 2012 through 4 April 2014. Our custom memory allocator protected against nearly every circumstance by which Heartbleed could have leaked SSL keys.

So: did the custom memory allocator exist already in August 2012? From reading the post this looks to be the case. Could it be that someone at Akamai took a look at the heartbeat (or other OpenSSL) code, decided that it could lead to memory leaks, and wrote their own memory allocator wrapper code to guard against this?

Edit: SSL -> OpenSSL