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Fastly S-1

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Re: Fastly S-1

#81

From 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…

Wait. What? 147 paying customers? I was personally one of those customers, paying like $100 a month, mostly just as a test. They really only added 147 paying customers? How many of them were just paying $100 a month for the base price?

It appears to be a misreading.

> We had 1,582 customers and 227 enterprise customers as of December 31, 2018. This is an increase of 143, or 10%, in customers and 57, or 33%, in enterprise customers from December 31, 2017.

Page 72.

The same figure appears again in the table on page 76.

Re: Fastly S-1

#82

From 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.

147% appears to be the Dollar-Based Net Expansion rate for the 3 months ending 31st Dec 2017.

It drops to 132% by 31st Dec 2018. Still a quite respectable figure.

Re: Fastly S-1

#84
post #48
post #23

The 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…

>IMHO, I think it's mostly a solution in search of a problem.

I agree, I've been looking at discussion one here recently on how someone was working on the problem of "data storage at the edge" to compliment their "compute at the edge" offering. I think you can argue that that when you move compute and data storage to the edge you've effectively moved the data center to the edge. At some point if you put enough data at the edge you operating your own backbone makes economic sense and CDN don't maintain backbones they mostly buy paid peering and transit and try to leverage public peering wherever they can. I would even say edge compute is a solution in search of revenue stream and hedge in a heavily commoditized market.

Re: Fastly S-1

#85
post #60
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not make sense if all your customers are in the US but locations like Australia and others very much have an issue with latency. Especially if the server they are hitting is around the globe.

NYC to Sydney is still only ~200 ms. That's probably in the realm of being noticeable but only barely. Even then, the real need is more like one server per continent rather than every cell tower.

200ms is human reaction time, you can definitely notice it; the rule of thumb is 100ms https://www.pubnub.com/blog/how-fast-is-realtime-human-perce...

Re: Fastly S-1

#86
post #33

Interesting that Brexit uncertainty is in their risk factors: > These developments, or the perception that any of them could occur, have had and may continue to have a significant adverse effect on global economic conditions and the stability of global financial markets, and could significantly reduce global market liquidity and limit the ability of key market participants to operate in certain financial markets. In…

basically legally required for anyone doing business in europe/UK to add that boilerplate

Re: Fastly S-1

#88
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

That's more of a CDN than edge compute. Edge compute would be something like having your Rails app run in a bunch of edge locations and then doing some eventually consistent magic to sync them up.

Re: Fastly S-1

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cedexis is also a good tool to measure, while most of it is a paid product, they have a few reports you can see. they also list cloud providers, and have other reports such as throughput, etc.

https://www.cedexis.com/get-the-data/country-report/

Re: Fastly S-1

#90
post #77

As 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…

What's the purge time like?
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