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Fastly S-1

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Re: Fastly S-1

#171

Post by siwyd »

notyourday wrote: post #153
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…

> 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?

> 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?

Akamai also has a fast purge these days, sub 5 seconds as well I believe. Works nicely.

Re: Fastly S-1

#172

Post by siwyd »

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…

Disclaimer: I work at a company that is both an Akamai and a Fastly client. I worked with Fastly first, then Akamai after. Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

There has definitely been a push to catch up, but I wouldn't say you're there yet. The Terraform provider for instance is not up to par with the Fastly one. Having attended an Akamai DevOps workshop not so long ago, there didn't seem to be an easy way to use the CLI tools to configure a property in an idempotent way in a CI/CD pipeline. Maybe things are different now.

Akamai has some advantages for enterprise customers though such as easy assignment of cost using the CP codes. That's very handy. The integration with Let's Encrypt is also very nice.

Fastly delivers in it's simplicity and documentation. Whatever use case you need, you'll most likely find it in their docs and on their blog. Being able to use VCL to configure your caching is in my opinion way easier (and with less limitations) than the Akamai rule tree (even if you don't have previous Varnish experience). Varnish's finite state machine makes it easy to configure and debug any kind of behavior you want. The Akamai rule tree has caused me quite a few 'WTF' moments. It's difficult to debug when something doesn't behave as expected and there's a certain amount of 'black magic' in the behaviors sometimes that makes it difficult to judge what the outcome will be.

The good thing is that both companies have different features and get pushed to incorporate features deemed useful by their customers at one or the other provider.

Re: Fastly S-1

#173

Post by notyourday »

siwyd wrote: post #171
notyourday wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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? Akamai also has a fast purge these days, sub 5 seconds as well I believe. Works nicely.

Fast purge only works on certain kind of objects in certain kind of configurations, not to mention the idea of "I would like tom make 20k purge requests in a second via an API" is met with stares.

Fastpurge is a hack.

Re: Fastly S-1

#174

Post by siwyd »

notyourday wrote: post #173
siwyd wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Akamai also has a fast purge these days, sub 5 seconds as well I believe. Works nicely.

Fast purge only works on certain kind of objects in certain kind of configurations, not to mention the idea of "I would like tom make 20k purge requests in a second via an API" is met with stares. Fastpurge is a hack.

Interesting. I only have experience with the occasional simple (manual) purge and I could verify the object was invalidated quickly. Can you elaborate on an example config where this goes awry?

Re: Fastly S-1

#175

Post by notyourday »

siwyd wrote: post #174
notyourday wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast purge only works on certain kind of objects in certain kind of configurations, not to mention the idea of "I would like tom make 20k purge requests in a second via an API" is met with stares. Fastpurge is a hack.

Interesting. I only have experience with the occasional simple (manual) purge and I could verify the object was invalidated quickly. Can you elaborate on an example config where this goes awry?

Fast purge works with all kinds of site delivery ( and site delivery based ) products. Unlike modern CDNs Akamai other products ( such as for example VOD and media services ) do not live in the same object space and hence are not fast purge compatible.

You would think purging a video stream would be the same as purging a standard site delivery object, after all it the stream is http(s) accessible .m3u8 and a pile of .ts chunks but that's not the case -- in some cases it can take up to one hundred and twenty minutes.

Re: Fastly S-1

#176

Post by greenleafjacob »

slivanes wrote: post #103
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 answe…

Check out this flow diagram for Varnish 2 [1].

[1] http://www.kalenyuk.com.ua/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/varnis...

Re: Fastly S-1

#177

Post by siwyd »

notyourday wrote: post #175
siwyd wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I only have experience with the occasional simple (manual) purge and I could verify the object was invalidated quickly. Can you elaborate on an example config where this goes awry?

Fast purge works with all kinds of site delivery ( and site delivery based ) products. Unlike modern CDNs Akamai other products ( such as for example VOD and media services ) do not live in the same object space and hence are not fast purge compatible. You would think purging a video stream would be the same as purging a standard site delivery object, after all it the stream is http(s) accessible .m3u8 and a pile of…

I see, thanks for the info.

Re: Fastly S-1

#178

Post by sytse »

At GitLab we use Fastly and we’ve been very happy with their service. It was fast to implement and greatly helped to speed things up. As a fellow Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) company I think it is cool that they are based on Varnish.

Re: Fastly S-1

#179

Post by kyledrake »

Jgrubb wrote: post #131
kyledrake wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's part of why I don't get it. Large companies have multiple competitors to negotiate with, driving down prices (and this does not look to change anytime soon, it's dropping 40%/year for transit). We're talking about an S-1 here. Where's that growth going to come from? Cannibalizing Akamai is not a long term IPO strategy.

I agree re: cannibalizing Akamai and I don't have any inside knowledge at all, just a fan of theirs and the last two companies I've worked for have both been customers. There's the security/WAF stuff that could be hugely lucrative for the larger customers that decide that's a priority. There's also whatever future potential edge computing/serverless ends up having. They're already kind of perfectly positioned to ramp…

Thanks, appreciate it. :)

Re: Fastly S-1

#180

Post by tedk-42 »

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?

I'm a fan for personal use but from what I saw, you need to switch your DNS over to them before you can begin to use their CDN. Unsure if this applies to their enterprise product...

I'm not sure why it wasn't given more attention. Their version of lambda/serverless looks interesting

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