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Fastly S-1

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Re: Fastly S-1

#91

Post by edmundsauto »

ArtWomb wrote: post #32
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Fastly will make a couple people very rich, and they seem to be doing fine without subsidies. Why should public funds go toward concentrating wealth even further?

Well, tech transfer can be a slow process. Primarily because of legal formalities around indemnification, liability, etc. You also have the common scenario where many competitors are working in the same problem domains. Only to find after years of effort that they have independently arrived at eerily similar solutions!

Can you explain to me how the last sentence speaks to the need for subsidies?

Re: Fastly S-1

#92

Post by [deleted] »

jacques_chester wrote: post #81
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Fastly S-1

#93

Post by bogomipz »

treis wrote: post #60
gmanley wrote: 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.

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.

Re: Fastly S-1

#94

Post by tylermenezes »

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…

I'm not talking about Akamai directly, I'm talking about the Azure interface, which is as close to Akamai as most HN commenters are likely to get. Akamai itself is great but the Azure interface makes you (and VZN) look terrible

Re: Fastly S-1

#95

Post by toast0 »

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.

Storing my data at my house makes sense, especially if upkeep of the box is relegated to the end user. Storing my data at the tower in my neighborhood, instead of a regional center seems to be a large increase in maintenance cost for a minimal decrease in latency.

Accessing the tower is expensive in time, and equipment that runs at the tower is exposed to a wider variety of temperatures and RF stress than in a nice warehouse somewhere in the metro area.

It's possible the right caching at towers could reduce the backhaul bandwidth requirements, but seems iffy.

Re: Fastly S-1

#96

Post by tylermenezes »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #67
bufferoverflow wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt your claims about Cloudflare being an order of magnitude slower, they are consistently one of the fastest CDNs: https://www.cdnperf.com/ Top 15: 1 Google Cloud CDN 36.70 ms 2 jsDelivr CDN 36.80 ms 3 Akamai CDN 38.00 ms 4 Verizon (Edgecast) CDN 38.30 ms 5 Azure CDN 38.50 ms 6 Fastly CDN 41.38 ms 7 Cloudflare CDN 41.80 ms 8 AWS CloudFront CDN 43.00 ms 9 CacheFly 43.90 ms 10 BunnyCDN 46.00 ms 11 StackPath…

Everything about what the top comment said seems like Fastly marketing propaganda. 7% increase in sales? With what sample size? With what confidence? How did you isolate variables? For reference, I work at a company with $110M in annual sales. We were planning to start using Fastly. For obvious reasons, we wanted to know how much of a net positive that would be for the business. So we wanted to A/B test it. For us, a…

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 money.)

That's based on several years with no substantial change in the way we market or the design of our site.

Re: Fastly S-1

#97

Post by tylermenezes »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #70
bufferoverflow wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt your claims about Cloudflare being an order of magnitude slower, they are consistently one of the fastest CDNs: https://www.cdnperf.com/ Top 15: 1 Google Cloud CDN 36.70 ms 2 jsDelivr CDN 36.80 ms 3 Akamai CDN 38.00 ms 4 Verizon (Edgecast) CDN 38.30 ms 5 Azure CDN 38.50 ms 6 Fastly CDN 41.38 ms 7 Cloudflare CDN 41.80 ms 8 AWS CloudFront CDN 43.00 ms 9 CacheFly 43.90 ms 10 BunnyCDN 46.00 ms 11 StackPath…

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.

There are a number of features Fastly has which others (excluding eg Akmai) don't which make head-to-head comparisons more difficult. I have no doubt that Cloudflare is very fast in perfect conditions, but there were a much higher number of cache misses because there's less flexible configuration which did literally make the difference between 20ms vs 200ms in production.

Re: Fastly S-1

#98

Post by icedchai »

tylermenezes wrote: post #96
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything about what the top comment said seems like Fastly marketing propaganda. 7% increase in sales? With what sample size? With what confidence? How did you isolate variables? For reference, I work at a company with $110M in annual sales. We were planning to start using Fastly. For obvious reasons, we wanted to know how much of a net positive that would be for the business. So we wanted to A/B test it. For us, a…

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.

Re: Fastly S-1

#99

Post by an_account_name »

sjwright wrote: post #58
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…

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.

Re: Fastly S-1

#100

Post by tylermenezes »

dubcanada wrote: post #64
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?

I am going to assume there is more to it then that. Even Amazon only says 100ms increments affect sales.

There was a difference of usable site time of about 500-600ms
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