Honestly, I love Fastly but wasn’t expecting this? Seems early.
Maybe it’s just a good time to strike while the market is frothy.
Fastly S-1
71–80 of 181 posts
Re: Fastly S-1
#72From 2017 to 2018, they added 147 new paying customers. Of which, 57 were enterprise and based on their metrics claiming > 80% of revenue was from these "enterprise" deals, probably high dollar. Still, ~$50m in marketing/advertising spend to earn 147 new paying customers (340k/customer) seems high to my untrained eye. Do those enterprise deals and that "132% Dollar Expansion Rate" justify such high CPA? Those with ex…
[deleted]
Re: Fastly S-1
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I highly doubt your claims about Cloudflare being an order of magnitude slower, they are consistently one of the fastest CDNs: https://www.cdnperf.com/ Top 15: 1 Google Cloud CDN 36.70 ms 2 jsDelivr CDN 36.80 ms 3 Akamai CDN 38.00 ms 4 Verizon (Edgecast) CDN 38.30 ms 5 Azure CDN 38.50 ms 6 Fastly CDN 41.38 ms 7 Cloudflare CDN 41.80 ms 8 AWS CloudFront CDN 43.00 ms 9 CacheFly 43.90 ms 10 BunnyCDN 46.00 ms 11 StackPath…
CDNPerf is an okay way to get an overview, but not a great way to actually compare CDNs. That said, it’s not 10x or whatever. Maybe like 5-10% depending on location.
Do you know of a better way than CDNPerf? They do 300 million requests per day from random users from around the world.
Re: Fastly S-1
#74The whole "edge compute" space seems poised to do well to me. Cloudflare's edge KV store and edge server-side JavaScript are obvious, but great ideas. The wildcard seems to be the companies that own cell towers. If they build a credible edge offering, that's a moat that is hard to beat.
>The whole "edge compute" space seems poised to do well to me. IMHO, I think it's mostly a solution in search of a problem. The internet backbone is fast enough to not be noticeable for end users. A centrally located server in the U.S. will have a maximum ping of 40 ms to anywhere in the U.S. That's faster than is perceptible to the end user. The only mainstream usage I can see is cloud gaming where ping is that crit…
That's only good for small media like websites and images. Videos and downloads need to be cached in the provider networks, you simply cannot serve terrabits of data from a single origin. Well, you can, but networks don't like to operate like that. So ya, at scale, you need edges. The internet is dominated by companies at scale.
Re: Fastly S-1
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ahh, yes, I read it as "small, business-focused CDN" though there's no comma there. You're right..they meant focused on "small business." I suppose the dash threw me off.
Fascinating, that’s because they did the dash wrong for the compound adjective. It should have been the ugly but correct “small-business-focused CDN”. If they didn’t want to double hyphenate then “small-business focused” would have been read properly by everyone. But you definitely parsed their “small[,] business-focused” correctly :).
Makes me appreciate the importance of grammar a bit more. I assumed I was reading it wrong. Thanks for sharing the detail.
Re: Fastly S-1
#76From 2017 to 2018, they added 147 new paying customers. Of which, 57 were enterprise and based on their metrics claiming > 80% of revenue was from these "enterprise" deals, probably high dollar. Still, ~$50m in marketing/advertising spend to earn 147 new paying customers (340k/customer) seems high to my untrained eye. Do those enterprise deals and that "132% Dollar Expansion Rate" justify such high CPA? Those with ex…
147%
Re: Fastly S-1
#77As a user, Fastly is really, really good. Akamai is the only serious competitor, but they are a lot more traditional in their sales and configuration. (You can theoretically use Azure as a middleman as some have pointed out, but they don't support custom SSL, and configuration changes take literally hours-to-days to propagate.) Cloudflare is fine but they are still an order of magnitude slower, which is why we switch…
DISCLAIMER: Akamai Product Manager here.
Deployment times for config changes have been operating at the sub-5m timeframe for at least two years. It used to take hours (never days) to propagate changes across the server estate, but not anymore. And while we were admittedly late to the DevOps train, we have made up lost ground. We have nearly 100 individual APIs to control almost any aspect of our products. CLIs if you don't want to write to the API. A Sandbox to test config changes locally. The ability to validate OAuth tokens at the Edge, cache GraphQL responses, and throttle and/or quota API traffic on a global basis. Hashtag "legacy CDN."
Re: Fastly S-1
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I would invest in Cloudflare before this, but that'd be based on name recognition.
Be aware though that name recognition in the enterprise space is very different from name recognition for small businesses and startups. Fastly focuses on the enterprise space, so having no name recognition with startups isn't really relevant to them.
True, it certainly highlights the "downmarket" strategy of Cloudflare (aiming for small to medium businesses).
Re: Fastly S-1
#79From 2017 to 2018, they added 147 new paying customers. Of which, 57 were enterprise and based on their metrics claiming > 80% of revenue was from these "enterprise" deals, probably high dollar. Still, ~$50m in marketing/advertising spend to earn 147 new paying customers (340k/customer) seems high to my untrained eye. Do those enterprise deals and that "132% Dollar Expansion Rate" justify such high CPA? Those with ex…
147% not 147 individual customers for anyone else confused.
Re: Fastly S-1
#80From 2017 to 2018, they added 147 new paying customers. Of which, 57 were enterprise and based on their metrics claiming > 80% of revenue was from these "enterprise" deals, probably high dollar. Still, ~$50m in marketing/advertising spend to earn 147 new paying customers (340k/customer) seems high to my untrained eye. Do those enterprise deals and that "132% Dollar Expansion Rate" justify such high CPA? Those with ex…
>~$50m in marketing/advertising spend to earn 147 new paying customers (340k/customer) seems high Without knowing the ROI it's really impossible to know if this is high or not. Spending $1 to make $2 is always the right decision.
> Spending $1 to make $2 is always the right decision.
Unless you have an opportunity to spend $1 and make $3. Your supply of dollar bills is still limited. It's hard to spend huge amounts of money. You've always got to consider where the greatest leverage exists.