3 ms·
I've used both Cloudflare and Fastly for many years, and the cache invalidation at Fastly is a way bigger deal than people think. They're not competing for a 5%
by tylermenezes 5y ago
I've used both Cloudflare and Fastly for many years, and the cache invalidation at Fastly is a way bigger deal than people think. They're not competing for a 5% improvement in performance, they're competing with a totally different set of features which mean you can cache 80% more things, as long as you design for it. (Which I'm sure is why they don't aggressively compete on free plans -- if you try to just throw it in front like Cloudflare you won't see much of a difference from Cloudflare.)
With some careful design to take advantage of it, I've gotten 5-10x faster page loads using Fastly. (The last time I pointed this out, people accused me of being a sockpuppet account. Feel free to Google me!)
- snowwrestler 5y agoYes. Caching is a different animal when you can count on fast, reliable, targeted invalidation. You can cache basically everything with super long TTLs, and just sniper-shot individual cache objects as soon as the backend updates.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sadsoul21 5y agoI'm curious, what "totally different set of features" are you referring to?
- tylermenezes 5y ago150ms global cache invalidation, tagged HTTP responses, custom VCL, etc
- sadsoul21 5y agowhat is "tagged HTTP responses"? Are you referring to surrogate keys?
- jbergstroem 5y agoI can definitely see how new use cases opens up based on a 150ms (global) invalidation. Most of my use cases relies more on local invalidation and I haven't done enough homework about on what latency I really need (read: wrong line of business). That said; in the world of Cloudflare I think durable objects/kv store probably would come to serve as the next architecture for cache itself and lead to reductions in latency. Don't quote me on that though.