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Fastly S-1

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Re: Fastly S-1

#141

Post by Rafuino »

an_account_name wrote: post #99
sjwright wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it difficult to believe that sales would be affected by a latency drop less than one tenth of a second. How did you isolate the variables?

No, this absolutely checks with my experience - I chase 5 and 10ms improvements all the time because we've measured and know it increases conversion. But it makes sense, too: if the metric here is average latency, that doesn't mean that some users didn't see a much more dramatic increase. Every tiny bit of frustration removed from the experience adds up.

What kind of storage do you use when chasing the 5-10ms improvements? I ask as someone working on super fast storage and memory and it's not always easy to find people who are aware of the differences in latency. I imagine you're already on NVMe SSDs, but if not, I'd be curious why (i.e. is software more of the issue than hardware?).

Re: Fastly S-1

#142

Post by icedchai »

wongarsu wrote: post #105
icedchai wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I agree it may make some difference... but I don't think it can all be attributed to a CDN change. Maybe they moved some buttons around the same time as the CDN update. Who knows.

Re: Fastly S-1

#143

Post by merreborn »

mevile wrote: post #140

Where I work, a website/app in the top 20 US alexa rankings, we use Fastly and it is pretty great. If I have a complaint it's that their varnish version is old. The web UI is great, the service is great. I've never had an issue with them in my many years of working with them.

Yeah they run a fork of varnish 2 with inline C disabled, and a number of custom extensions (surrogate keys, tables/dictionaries, etc.) -- as well as likely customizations to support their massively multi-tenant deployment and more

Add in the necessity of porting vcl for all of their customers, and the prospect of upgrading varnish is obviously pretty daunting.

I suspect they'd rather focus on their new webassembly-based configuration solution, rather than try to keep up with changes in VCL

Re: Fastly S-1

#144

Post by merreborn »

ec109685 wrote: post #40
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…

Those enterprises are re “-occurring revenue, so I am sure their LTVs are factored in with the spend.

And their biggest enterprise customers are paying fastly at least 6 figures annually

Re: Fastly S-1

#146

Post by merreborn »

ramraj07 wrote: post #26
burger_moon wrote: post #24

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

Wouldn't that be true for many companies, even AWS possibly?

suffice it to say: a bunch of AWS features were essentially developed for the benefit of netflix. So, while it entails some risk, ultimately, yes: it's not uncommon for a handful of customers to be the 900 lb gorillas

Re: Fastly S-1

#147

Post by sdan »

tomschlick wrote: post #47
tedk-42 wrote: post #42

/* Work for a Media Company */ We're looking to move one of our sites off Akamai mostly for costs reasons. Fastly configuration in Varnish VCL - Senior Engineers from my company highly rate Varnish as a cache software so Fastly was an easy choice. I believe Akamai have been our CDN from the start. The amount of reconfiguration we'd need to do to get everything off would create a huge number of tickets in our work que…

I'm curious how Cloudflare would compare? Did you evaluate their products?

Curious too. I may be bias, but I genuinely like Cloudflare and all there products, because they simply work and work good.

Re: Fastly S-1

#148

Post by merreborn »

treis wrote: post #48
tyingq wrote: 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…

https://hpbn.co/transport-layer-security-tls/#leverage-early...

Establishing a connection can require several round trips, and the latency adds up. "early termination" with a point of presence near your end user makes a pretty massive difference, especially if your user isn't on the same continent. Every additional 100ms costs amazon 1% of their revenue https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=273900

Re: Fastly S-1

#149

Post by rsweeney21 »

Is it a coincidence that there has been such a large uptick in IPOs just over 10 years after the real-estate meltdown? Or did the meltdown kill off a generation of unicorns that couldn't get funding during the crunch?

It's just anecdotal evidence, but I talked to a CEO that had just closed a deal with his A round from Kliner Perkins in August or September 2008. When it came time to fund the deal, the partners at the VC firm made the capital call and the LPs couldn't fund. So Kliner Perkins called the CEO and told them they had to cancel the deal.

The CEO had to make big cuts, couldn't pay rent on the building, etc. He eventually sold the company, but I wonder if it or others would have been IPOing around 2014-2015 if they had gotten the funding they needed.

Re: Fastly S-1

#150

Post by nyc_pizzadev »

zackbloom wrote: post #138
nyc_pizzadev wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an edge to work, you need security. That means transport encryption which requires certs. I think this fact alone will keep the edge at modern secured datacenters. There is limited physical security at cell sites. Even less at the users home. This could mean there is no more transport encryption for this kind of edge. Or even worse, private key loss. Not saying no here, just pointing out a very large concern.

Have you taken a look at the Cloudflare Keyless SSL tech?

Just did and I think it furthers my point. Cloudflare now owns your key and the edge is now their network.

My concern is cert/key management where the edge is somewhere you have very little control over, like a cell tower, random building network, or a users house. Even with keyless, once that device is in my home, Im pretty sure that entire thing can be reverse engineered. Not easy, like probes and oscilloscopes on exposed leads hard, but physical access is pretty much game over, no?

I've worked in this space and the solution is detection and mitigation. Limit the damage to single devices, workflow the user in, look for human attack patterns. Defense is futile.

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