6 ms·

/* 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 Enginee

/* 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 queue. The primary advantage of Akamai has been the number of datacenters they have to service our traffic. A customer can be in remote Australia and have their packets cached in a datacenter in the nearby telephone exchange. That's the reach of Akamai that AWS and Fastly can't compete with. Their WAF and Bot detection products are also very good. They are a definitely an enterprise/full service CDN provider. I definitely wouldn't call them 'legacy' by any means but the type of service they provide is so different to a new player like Fastly.

tomschlick 8y ago
I'm curious how Cloudflare would compare? Did you evaluate their products?
- sdan 8y ago
  Curious too. I may be bias, but I genuinely like Cloudflare and all there products, because they simply work and work good.
- tedk-42 7y ago
  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
xfitm3 8y ago
Fastly’s major advantage is near instant CDN config changes, where Akamai can take an hour to push a new cdn config.
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  Is that an actual advantage though?
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Yes.
  - notyourday 8y ago
    Yes, it is an amazing advantage, especially paired with configuration being a VCL.
- jsizzle 8y ago
  This is dated. Akamai pushes configs out in minutes now
  - xfitm3 8y ago
    Not for all parameters. I pushed out a origin change on Akamai this year and it took about 75 minutes.
- tedk-42 7y ago
  Definitely true - their instant deploys are very impressive from an operations point of view. Small changes only take a few minutes to roll out on Akamai's network. Another commenter talked about Fastly's POP count. Akamai has far more as can be seen here: https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/solutions/intelligent-platform/visualizing-akamai/media-delivery-map.jsp https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/solutions/intelligent-platform/... No doubt having so many POPs (some probably legacy and slower to update) likely extend the update time.
cagenut 8y ago
Fastly has 4 PoPs in Australia and two in New Zealand, you can see their reach in the map on their site: https://www.fastly.com/network-map https://www.fastly.com/network-map Also, if you're a big enough deal (thousands/month+) you'd be surprised how much of that config re-write the fastly sales engineers can help you with.

tomschlick 8y ago

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

sdan 8y ago
Curious too. I may be bias, but I genuinely like Cloudflare and all there products, because they simply work and work good.
tedk-42 7y ago
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

xfitm3 8y ago

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

madeofpalk 8y ago
Is that an actual advantage though?
- manigandham 8y ago
  Yes.
- notyourday 8y ago
  Yes, it is an amazing advantage, especially paired with configuration being a VCL.
jsizzle 8y ago
This is dated. Akamai pushes configs out in minutes now
- xfitm3 8y ago
  Not for all parameters. I pushed out a origin change on Akamai this year and it took about 75 minutes.
tedk-42 7y ago
Definitely true - their instant deploys are very impressive from an operations point of view. Small changes only take a few minutes to roll out on Akamai's network. Another commenter talked about Fastly's POP count. Akamai has far more as can be seen here: https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/solutions/intelligent-platform/visualizing-akamai/media-delivery-map.jsp https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/solutions/intelligent-platform/... No doubt having so many POPs (some probably legacy and slower to update) likely extend the update time.

cagenut 8y ago

Fastly has 4 PoPs in Australia and two in New Zealand, you can see their reach in the map on their site: https://www.fastly.com/network-map https://www.fastly.com/network-map Also, if you're a big enough deal (thousands/month+) you'd be surprised how much of that config re-write the fastly sales engineers can help you with.