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Fastly S-1

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Re: Fastly S-1

#101

Post by tylermenezes »

mxpxrocks10 wrote: post #57
tylermenezes wrote: post #52

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…

hi- curious about your completed sales stats. What are you selling? was it instant? was it gross top line?

We sell low-cost tickets to events to largely non-technical students. On the order of 10k sales a year, so we're nowhere near enterprise scale (which is also why we couldn't use Akamai). www.srnd.org if you'd like to learn more.

Re: Fastly S-1

#102

Post by rajeshp1986 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #68
celestialcheese wrote: post #31

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?

I highly doubt if they counted you as an enterprise customer. Enterprise customers have significantly large multi-year contracts. I have worked in sales org before and we reported only contracts which fetched ~ 100k/year as enterprise customer. 10k to 100k were reported as SMB customers. These numbers may be different for Fastly but I doubt $100/month customers are called Enterprise customers.

Re: Fastly S-1

#103

Post by slivanes »

moderation wrote: post #39

via https://twitter.com/justincormack/status/1119217911380545536 interesting to see some technical detail in the S1 including a likely reference to WASM, WASI and Lucet [0]. "Moreover, our platform is highly technical and complex and relies on the Varnish Configuration Language (VCL). Potential developers may be unfamiliar or opposed to working with VCL and therefore decide to not adopt our platform, which may harm o…

I was tasked to integrate Fastly into our infrastructure having not done any configuration with Varnish (VCL) before. ~10k req/s

VCL can be challenging for complex flow control (IMO), but it is made easier with Fastly enhanced/custom VCL modules.

Their documentation was good, and the Fastly support team was excellent. Their sales engineers gave us a baseline configuration that suited our needs and were quick to answer any followup questions.

Haven't noticed any downtime or response delays to date.

Re: Fastly S-1

#104

Post by acdha »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #73
foobarbazetc wrote: post #70

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.

Is there any documentation on how they measure it? If they're running tests from data centers / peering points or testing things which are highly-likely to be cached the results are going to be harder to generalize to normal usage.

Re: Fastly S-1

#105

Post by wongarsu »

icedchai wrote: post #98
tylermenezes wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can Google my name if you think I'm working for Fastly. The only connection I have is that they are our CDN. They donate it, as we're a nonprofit, but I have zero obligation to say anything about them either way. 7% increase represents an increase in the number of students/parents purchasing tickets to our events. (It's not like they're spending more individually, but more people have been willing to give us mone…

How do you know the 7% increase was due to Fastly and not some other small unrelated change to your web site? A few 10 ms makes no difference.

> A few 10 ms makes no difference.

About a 1-2% difference per 100 ms seems well supported (e.g. [1]), at least if your page load time is already low enough. 7% is very high, but some effect is expected.

1: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/w...

Re: Fastly S-1

#106

Post by sidd_p »

directionless wrote: post #90
cosjef wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Less than 5s across all 240K+ global servers

Re: Fastly S-1

#107

Post by arosier »

burger_moon wrote: post #24

Interesting that just 10 customers make up over a third of revenue for them.

Customers highlighted on their homepage: Alaska Air, Ticketmaster, Vimeo, Airbnb, Pinterest, NYT, Twitter, and Buzzfeed. I guess that leaves, New Relic and Github from their S1.

Though they also have several media heavy companies besides Vimeo highlighted in their case studies. Including: Wistia, A&E, iHeartMedia, Shazam, 7Digital, and FuboTV

Re: Fastly S-1

#108

Post by treis »

bogomipz wrote: post #93
treis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That statement is categorically false. One simple example is online gaming/MMOGs where a latency of 200 ms would be be a miserable experience. The upper bound often targeted for "acceptable interactivity" is somewhere between 100-130ms.

(1) I excluded gaming as something that is legitimately ping dependent

(2) You can achieve 100-130 ms latency with a "like one data center per continent" sort of network. You don't need edge computing on hundreds or thousands of edge sites to achieve that.

Re: Fastly S-1

#109

Post by treis »

huac wrote: post #85
treis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Your cite says that < 1s is "for users to feel they are interacting freely with the information". Even a 400ms round trip is well within that limit.

Re: Fastly S-1

#110

Post by freyr »

useful wrote: post #51
reza_n wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edge facilities are warehouses in regional locations with excellent backbone connectivity, basically your modern datacenter. Cellphone towers can probably host a few racks, that's not a profitable business and its not "internet scale". If the regional datacenter has a 15ms ping to each tower in the region, then you have pretty good coverage.

I think you underestimate what the edge will become. There are already startups trying to store your data at your house, cellphone tower, isp, etc. In ways where there is no central store or in ways that everything is eventually consistent. Computing at the edge is a very interesting topic.

Why is storage at a (space-limited) cell tower more interesting than storage/compute at the ISP or packet core (or whatever's at the other end of the backhaul)?

How much latency do you think is incurred between the ISP and cell tower?

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