Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fastly S-1

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 181 posts

Re: Fastly S-1

#151

Post by merreborn »

tyingq wrote: post #8
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #3

I haven't looked at any other details, but Googling Fastly says this: "Fastly, Inc. is an American cloud computing services provider. Fastly's edge cloud platform provides a content delivery network, Internet security services, load balancing, and video & streaming services" Just judging by that statement, I feel they're going to be eaten by AWS, GCP, and maybe Azure. However, it seems their focus may be on creating…

They are in the CDN/Edge space. Akamai and Cloudflare are more direct comparisons. AWS, GCP, and Azure have CDNs as well, but those are more typically used by existing customers to front things running there.

Fastly also has more "points of presence" than AWS/GCP

Fastly has deployments in 17 north american cities. AWS is in 5.

They're pretty different strategies. For every massive AWS datacenter on a continent, fastly has at least 3 tiny ones -- inevitably closer to your customers, meaning lower RTT.

Re: Fastly S-1

#152

Post by notyourday »

madeofpalk wrote: post #133
xfitm3 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastly’s major advantage is near instant CDN config changes, where Akamai can take an hour to push a new cdn config.

Is that an actual advantage though?

Yes, it is an amazing advantage, especially paired with configuration being a VCL.

Re: Fastly S-1

#153

Post by notyourday »

cosjef wrote: post #77
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…

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…

> Deployment times for config changes have been operating at the sub-5m timeframe for at least two years.

Fastly is sub 5 seconds.

> And while we were admittedly late to the DevOps train, we have made up lost ground.

Not anywhere close. Your cache invalidation takes forever. Ability to assign tag objects does not exist. Engaging "professional services" to make a config change like it is 2002?

Re: Fastly S-1

#154

Post by pfranz »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #149

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…

I know very little about that world, but I heard Dodd-Frank made going public less appealing. The first google hit for "IPO over time"[1] shows a drop after the dot-com bubble around 2000 and not much around when Dodd-Frank got passed--but it seems surprisingly flat. Money has been really cheap since the recovery. This, plus the amount of VC money, has likely made the threshold for IPO much higher.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/270290/number-of-ipos-in...

Re: Fastly S-1

#155

Post by ggm »

I don't use fastly on the supply side but I do use it as a consumer and the services they host that I use have good responsiveness and availability.

The fastly engineers I know are nice people. They take care, they're smart and afaik they've stayed small and focussed as a group. They're active in operations groups, standards.

What's not to love?

Re: Fastly S-1

#156

Post by jedberg »

joshua_gallardo wrote: post #87

This guy has compiled the breakdown of equity owned by founders at IPO, of all the recent (and some historical) IPOs: https://grph.com/d/mzo1W9QP4Mk You'd be surprised how random these appear. I guess there's no science to it, and much more chance is involved than we would like to admit.

Be careful making assumptions from those graphs. In some cases they include employee owners and in other cases they don't. For example, for Pagerduty, one of the cofounders is missing, presumably under "Other" since he's the only cofounder that's an employee. But for Google Larry and Sergey are listed. So I'm not sure how it was decided who goes in the graph.

Re: Fastly S-1

#157

Post by merreborn »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #149

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…

https://i.imgur.com/5ZwpT7z.png

Venture capital spending keeps rising. and a lot of it is coming from SoftBank https://www.recode.net/2017/10/11/16459856/softbank-biggest-...

Re: Fastly S-1

#159

Post by mherdeg »

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…

> That speed does make a difference. When we switched from Cloudflare to Fastly we had about a 7% increase in completed sales.

Interesting. Is that for the flow that starts at https://www.srnd.org/sponsor => https://www.srnd.org/sponsor/pay or somewhere else?

(Those pages do load very fast.)

Re: Fastly S-1

#160

Post by paxys »

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…

Gaming is a bad example because it isn't the ping to the edge server that matters but ping to another user.
Post reply on HN