Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

The primary feature advertised on fastly's website is a feature every real CDN (as in, "not CloudFront") offers: an API to immediately purge your content. It is not at all clear what differentiates them.

Looking at their feature plan breakdown doesn't help with this either: none of the CDNs I've used have limited the number of backend domains I've had, and all offered 24/7.

To be clear: that is not because I'm already paying the same $5k/mo minimum: my bandwidth costs have almost always been much lower than that over the last four years I've used CDNs; this is just not a common restriction.

Whether you are dealing with Akamai, CDNetworks, or EdgeCast, every level in the CDN world offers this feature. I believe CacheFly even had this mechanism. (Looking into t, I remember correctly.)

Meanwhile, their bandwidth pricing is insane (albeitimilar to CloudFront): their $/GB is a few times what I'm paying for a "real CDN", and is about what you will get if you call Akamai and then don't negotiate.

The real question is: how many points of presence do they have? CDNetworks has over a hundred, and Akamai has over a thousand. Are we talking "even smaller than CloudFlare" here? (Apparently, the answer is "yes: even smaller, they only 7".)

Alright. Let's go point-by-point.

The primary feature advertised on fastly's website is a feature every real CDN (as in, "not CloudFront") offers: an API to immediately purge your content.

Every CDN offers a mechanism to purge content, but they are not immediate. Edgecast takes up to 15 minutes, CDNetworks I've seen take 20, Cloudfront can take as much as 30. When we say immediate, we mean really immediate. Generally speaking, it takes about 150 milliseconds.

Meanwhile, their bandwidth pricing is insane (albeitimilar to CloudFront): their $/GB is a few times what I'm paying for a "real CDN", and is about what you will get if you call Akamai and then don't negotiate.

Obviously, we will negotiate as well when we're talking about significant amounts of traffic. And good luck getting Akamai to call you back if you don't have significant amounts of traffic.

The real question is: how many points of presence do they have? CDNetworks has over a hundred, and Akamai has over a thousand. Are we talking "even smaller than CloudFlare" here? (Apparently, the answer is "yes: even smaller, they only 7".)

Yep. That's true. We're a rather young company and are actively expanding. However, what is most notable about this is that despite having far fewer pops, we're still significantly faster than most other CDNs, especially in major population centers. We've put a ton of work into reducing latency inside our servers so as to make better use of the pops that we currently have.

And good luck getting Akamai to call you back if you don't have significant amounts of traffic.

Look, I realize this notion sounds right and fits with the common dogma about Akamai, but it is actually a lie: I have personally had long conversations with Akamai negotiating deals where I would have had no minimum commitment (although there were other totally reasonable non-monetary concessions involved), and their prices still beat the ones on your website (albeit only by a sliver).

(By the way, I am going to explicitly point out that if you had stopped after your first paragraph about how your API is different, I would now have just apologized and been interested to learn more about why people needed that, but this obvious and totally incorrect FUD about peoples' abilities to negotiate workable deals with Akamai is really bothering me. I wasn't actually "anti-fastly" before: I just found it expensive and confusing... but now?)

Also, that "2 billion requests per day" might sound silly to someone who serves that in an hour...

We like to think that the exact number of requests is less important than exactly how they're handled. While it would be cool to go "we serve a billion requests a second", we're still an early stage startup. We're spending more time making our responses even faster (< 1ms on the 99th percentile) and trying to provide things that no one else does (for instance, instant purging and surrogate key purging).

I must say - that kind of perf is superb, though top percentile and averages aren't super representative of the average customer's experience. What are your tp50 and tp90 like?

Your sub-150ms invalidation is equally if not more impressive, especially if you're talking about multi-region invalidation.

TTFB at the 50th hovers around 175 microseconds, 75th is at 250 microseconds, 95th around 450 microseconds.

As for the purging stuff, I do mean cross-region. So, it depends upon which node receives your purge request. 150ms is average, but really it's "network latency plus a millisecond or so".

Wait, so 95% of your customers experience a TTFB of less than 500 microseconds (tp95 of 450 microseconds)? I just want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly. Because that's awesome.

95% of requests. But yeah! And thank you. :)

I'm sorry that my statement is bothering you. I'm going based on numerous conversations with people considering using Fastly. It's quite possible that I have a skewed sample, however I'm not intentionally spreading FUD, for what that's worth.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor

Just FYI, Cotendo has real time purging (and has for several years).

Also, your Asian/Australian pricing is ridiculous.

On Pricing, I must be missing something because All EdgeCast, CDNetwork and Akamai Resellers are similarly priced. And unless you get to lots of traffics for the majority these Big CDN player wont even deal with us directly.

Although with only 7 PoPs i could understand why you think it is overpriced.

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