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Comment by jbergstroem | Hacker News Reader

In the context of "should I use Cloudflare or Fastly as my edge", I lean Cloudflare. That said, I enjoyed listening to the GraphCDN crew choosing Fastly[1] – one crucial feather in the hat being cache invalidation[2] (miss ya, Phil Karlton) – and it sounds like a solid choice.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpmpTJc_SP0 [2]: https://graphcdn.io/docs/how-to/purge-the-cache

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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!)

I 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.

Yes. 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.

I'm curious, what "totally different set of features" are you referring to?

150ms global cache invalidation, tagged HTTP responses, custom VCL, etc

what is "tagged HTTP responses"? Are you referring to surrogate keys?

Keep in mind that Fastly's C@E might not even be needed, as you get VCL as standard. You don't check pre-made boxes, you write a non-Turing complete but quite powerful language that gets atomically deployed to their whole CDN in a few seconds. I'm a big fan.

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