4 ms·

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 platf

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 a viable business, rather than trying to spin an open-source project into a business (e.g., Docker Cloud). We already see that Docker is losing business to people using the OSS, but paying Amazon or Google for ECR and GCR, respectively. That being said, there are some smaller somewhat related players, such as PagerDuty that seem to be off to a good start. Twilio's stock has performed well historically, too, as has Splunk. But these later companies seem to be solving problems that make them less direct competitors with the bigger players.

lathiat 8y ago
They are more like Cloudflare or Akamai
- JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
  I think I would invest in Cloudflare before this, but that'd be based on name recognition.
  - wongarsu 8y ago
    Be aware though that name recognition in the enterprise space is very different from name recognition for small businesses and startups. Fastly focuses on the enterprise space, so having no name recognition with startups isn't really relevant to them.
    - JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
      True, it certainly highlights the "downmarket" strategy of Cloudflare (aiming for small to medium businesses).
tyingq 8y ago
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.
- merreborn 8y ago
  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.
neom 8y ago
They serve a small number of relatively high revenue opportunity use cases (SMB/Mid-Enterprise). If you use a lot of specialized CDN and want solutions engineers to work with, know you need it but don't have the capability to do it well in house, etc, "hosted" companies like Fastly, Aiven, Elastic make a lot of sense (things that are easy till they're not). My biggest red flag for fastly would be: cloudflare.
justincormack 8y ago
Why don't you read the filing? It covers the competitive landscape. Competition Our platform spans several markets from cloud computing and cloud security to CDNs. We segment the competitive landscape into four key categories: •Legacy CDNs like Akamai, Limelight, EdgeCast (part of Verizon Digital Media), Level3, and Imperva (for security); •Small business focused CDNs like InStart, Cloudflare, StackPath, and Section.io; •Cloud providers who are starting to offer compute functionality at the edge like Amazon’s CloudFront, AWS Lambda, and Google Cloud Platform; and •Traditional data center and appliance vendors like F5, Citrix, A10 Networks, Cisco, Imperva, Radware, and Arbor, as well as networks that offer a range of on-premise solutions for load balancing, WAF, and DDoS.
- JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
  I can't say I'm impressed by Akamai, but then again, Zoom came out of nowhere and is likely to clean house in the B2B video conferencing space. Maybe Fastly will give legacy players a run for their money.
speeq 8y ago
I'm using Firebase Hosting (by Google) and the IP address resolves to Fastly, at least in the EU.
- tyingq 8y ago
  That's pretty odd. Why would Google use a 3rd party to front their own service?
  - tambre 8y ago
    They acquired Firebase. On Firebase Hosting for apex domains one needs to add Fastly's Anycast IPs. Switching CDNs would be a nightmare. One related gripe I have with Firebase Hosting is that it refuses to renew certificates if you also add IPv6 addresses.
  - enitihas 8y ago
    I think firebase is using fastly before they got acquired by google. There was a post on HN describing their move from couldfront to Fastly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314209
    - tyingq 8y ago
      Sure, but the acquisition was in 2014. I assumed they would want to serve it from their own global infrastructure. Perhaps they have a great deal with Fastly.

lathiat 8y ago

They are more like Cloudflare or Akamai

JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
I think I would invest in Cloudflare before this, but that'd be based on name recognition.
- wongarsu 8y ago
  Be aware though that name recognition in the enterprise space is very different from name recognition for small businesses and startups. Fastly focuses on the enterprise space, so having no name recognition with startups isn't really relevant to them.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
    True, it certainly highlights the "downmarket" strategy of Cloudflare (aiming for small to medium businesses).

tyingq 8y ago

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.

merreborn 8y ago
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.

neom 8y ago

They serve a small number of relatively high revenue opportunity use cases (SMB/Mid-Enterprise). If you use a lot of specialized CDN and want solutions engineers to work with, know you need it but don't have the capability to do it well in house, etc, "hosted" companies like Fastly, Aiven, Elastic make a lot of sense (things that are easy till they're not). My biggest red flag for fastly would be: cloudflare.

justincormack 8y ago

Why don't you read the filing? It covers the competitive landscape. Competition Our platform spans several markets from cloud computing and cloud security to CDNs. We segment the competitive landscape into four key categories: •Legacy CDNs like Akamai, Limelight, EdgeCast (part of Verizon Digital Media), Level3, and Imperva (for security); •Small business focused CDNs like InStart, Cloudflare, StackPath, and Section.io; •Cloud providers who are starting to offer compute functionality at the edge like Amazon’s CloudFront, AWS Lambda, and Google Cloud Platform; and •Traditional data center and appliance vendors like F5, Citrix, A10 Networks, Cisco, Imperva, Radware, and Arbor, as well as networks that offer a range of on-premise solutions for load balancing, WAF, and DDoS.

JMTQp8lwXL 8y ago
I can't say I'm impressed by Akamai, but then again, Zoom came out of nowhere and is likely to clean house in the B2B video conferencing space. Maybe Fastly will give legacy players a run for their money.

speeq 8y ago

I'm using Firebase Hosting (by Google) and the IP address resolves to Fastly, at least in the EU.

tyingq 8y ago
That's pretty odd. Why would Google use a 3rd party to front their own service?
- tambre 8y ago
  They acquired Firebase. On Firebase Hosting for apex domains one needs to add Fastly's Anycast IPs. Switching CDNs would be a nightmare. One related gripe I have with Firebase Hosting is that it refuses to renew certificates if you also add IPv6 addresses.
- enitihas 8y ago
  I think firebase is using fastly before they got acquired by google. There was a post on HN describing their move from couldfront to Fastly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4314209
  - tyingq 8y ago
    Sure, but the acquisition was in 2014. I assumed they would want to serve it from their own global infrastructure. Perhaps they have a great deal with Fastly.