Fastly Edge Cloud Platform

I use the solution in my company for security, WAF, and CDN media delivery.

We are using Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly. In order to be a hybrid reseller, we want to be an agnostic vendor. We have all three in our portfolio, and they offer quite the same solutions, like edge security, security on the edge, and delivery acceleration of websites. There are also zero-trust solutions, like Cloudflare and Akamai. Fastly is not as much of a zero-trust solution. There is no such feature that is special. I am in this market, and I want to be an agnostic reseller, giving advice to my customers in their use cases.

What I don't like about Fastly is that they charge a heavy price. The pricing is different per region. If you have a customer who is international and has deployments in different regions, it is very complicated to calculate the pricing because every delivery region has a different price. AWS also has prices per region, which is a mess because, very often, you have customers who don't know how much traffic they have in what region. Offering them a service and competing against someone who knows that it's very hard because the pricing is per region, and that makes it very complicated to find solid pricing for the tool.

There are customers who shift their traffic. One day, they have a lot of traffic in Europe, and then the next day, they have lots of traffic in Latin America, and then there is always a different price sheet.

The tool basically follows the market. The tool tries to offer everything. I would like the tool to have a much stronger integration of the security product on the platform because products like bot manager or WAF used to be not native. You have to buy Fastly and then some sort of cooperation with some other WAF vendors is needed, but that is not what I am looking for currently.

I have been using Fastly for five to six years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

The number of customers I deal with is much smaller because Fastly itself makes a lot of direct sales. Fastly doesn't have a very strong partner channel. Fastly doesn't look very good with partners. The tool goes directly to the customer, and it is very hard to cooperate with them.

The product's initial setup phase is straightforward. I would say that the setup is more like using Fastly, which is an embedded local firewall application, which is something I don't look into because I don't want to have a SaaS solution. I want to have a dashboard and configure it. I don't want to run virtual machines or look after a network. I don't want to install anything on AWS or anywhere. I haven't used WAF from Fastly so far because it is one of the two hundred WAFs out there. AWS has its own WAF, and it may not be as sophisticated as Fastly. If you need any integration in Fastly, it is probably good if you use one of the products, like Adobe Experience Manager, or if you are a customer of Adobe. You can also be a user of Magento, which is an Adobe product and has Fastly built-in. Fastly tool is part of some products. The customer already gets part of Fastly as it is built into those applications. It is wise for customers to use Fastly within their products and then additionally buy some extra features from Fastly that aren't standard within the product. Fastly is a company that is aiming for a lot of very big customers. Fastly was a supplier for TikTok, but they are not anymore as it is a very competitive market, and it lost the contract.

In our company, we like Fastly technology, and at the same time, we want to be an agnostic solution provider for multi-service edge providers, which is the reason why we offer Akamai and Fastly. As I am involved in Fastly's technology, I can basically tell my customers to look at different solutions. I can recommend a tool, depending on your use case, and which one would be the best for you. If you want Cloudflare or Fastly, we help you integrate it. As a neutral vendor, I don't stick to just one product, and that is my advantage. Fastly's interest is to win every customer they talk to, so it goes very often directly to the customer because its reseller is selling more than one product and not just Fastly exclusively. I know a couple of customers who do direct business with Fastly, but that doesn't involve me.

You need to pay a premium price for the tool.

In terms of security features, Cloudflare came into the security game very late. Cloudflare has a WAF solution, which it sort of purchased, so it is not native to its portfolio. It kind of becomes native now because they integrate it, and you can have the WAF deployed either locally in your network or upon points of presence with Fastly, which is a legit web application firewall.

It is a good solution. It is a very developer-focused tool. Fastly has an easy setup process. It is a solution that is based on Varnish. Varnish is a caching language. Fastly Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) is a programming language that has already been around since the 1980s. Varnish is very native to developers who run Apache servers, which is also the concept of Fastly. We are using the skills of developers who know the configuration of the web servers, and we accelerate traffic using this special programming language. Fastly competes against Varnish itself because it is not a company. Varnish is an open-source product.

The users should be very strong, especially in order to facilitate quickly; everyone should have a strong knowledge of Varnish Configuration Language, which is VCL. If they just need to locally use the solutions and if they don't need worldwide distribution, they can do it via Varnish without Fastly being only used if you are a big corporation and you need to compute in lots of regions, and you don't want to run all the compute by yourself. If you are a big company and you want to have a global footprint in computing, you can deploy your own servers everywhere, like Azure, AWS, or any computing platform, but then you would run into a lot of costs. Fastly offers a platform, but I don't know how many POPs.Fastly is offering to compute functionality on its platform based on how an oil company sells you oil.

Fastly has a big computing platform, and if it is able to run computing on edge, it can also run AI on the edge because AI is nothing but computing in order to accelerate algorithms on edge, which is where you connect to the internet. If your computer is in London, you probably get connected with a British telecom company, and your first connection out of your house or office is to some sort of server related to a British telecom company, and it is what is known as the edge. If your computer comes from AI, media, or video, you are basically close to the British Telecom network, and the experience will be faster as you won't be able to connect to anything in Zurich, Tokyo, or Moscow. You connect directly to your local provider. Bring computing to the edge so you can accelerate your experience, so it will accelerate AI, video, and anything else because it is closer to you. If you make a request in ChatGPT, the request goes to some server, and that is at the speed of light. If you are connected to a server in Australia, that could take up to 200 milliseconds, which is, like, two-tenths of a second, and if you do that quite often and if the request goes, like, 20 to 30 times, you end up waiting maybe three to four seconds for the answer of your request. If the British telecom, it has gone half a second because it is closer.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

We're using it as the primary content delivery network for a large number of websites that we're responsible for, and we're using it in a configuration of an edge and a shield in front of our organization. 

And we use it in our deployed pipeline. So everything is configuration, is code. We use their VCL technology quite extensively for the functionality of the Edge behavior.

Fastly's instant purging feature improved our content monitoring processes. One of the differences between CloudFront and Fastly is the time to purge. 

So, Fastly's time to purge is very quick. And we've automated it with some front-end API calls. We've even integrated it with Slack so that we can push that clearing of content to a Telstra approach. So the content developer or the person who has the issue with the stale content can actually be empowered to clear their own cache without having to go through someone with the appropriate permissions. So, the fact that we can expose that with API calls is pretty good. 

Moreover, I can see service history and service metrics. So, it's mostly metrics and historical data. For example, how many times do specific properties have the highest rate of, say, 500 errors or something?

Moreover, Fastly helps our company manage a traffic spike during some high-traffic attempts if we have any.

Fastly's request collapsing is their secret sauce, and you get that with Varnish. That's really their massive value proposition, and that they in high traffic spike, even if we have our caching configuration low, it still protects our origin from a big traffic stop because we only get, like, one request coming in. Because that's what they do. They collapse the request such that we might get a thousand people asking for the same piece of data that's not in the cache, but they don't come at us with a thousand requests, the origin. They send one request to the origin and then wait for it to come back, and then they populate the sibling characters with that answer. So it's a sort of table state functionality that they provide that is really key to their value proposition.

Its VCL is very powerful, and the fact that we can interface with a deployed pipeline for the configuration as code is really great. So we don't have to do things with their web interface. Everything can be done programmatically as opposed to by hand. 

Fastly is very stable, reliable, and fast. And when Fastly does its technology upgrades, it does a good job.

Stronger analytics would be helpful like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned.

It doesn't show the number of properties where a configuration change happened within a specific timeframe, or there's some options. There's a lot in that area where things could be improved.

I have been using it for six years. 

We never faced any crashes, downtimes, or lagging. Fastly manages its infrastructure really well.

Fastly is very scalable. We haven't had any issues. Our on-prem one, which was one of the concerns, is we, again, can only scale to what you installed as hardware, and we did have some issues a few times with the maximum capacity that it could handle. 

So, in our case, it was connections to origin, when we did have a problem.

Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly. 

From the acknowledgment point of view, sometimes it takes a little while to get it to the right place. But a lot of time, just for the nature of the types of things we're asking for, we generally don't ask for Trivial support. 

So a lot of the times when we ask for something, it's not hitting tier one or tier two anyway because it's inappropriate for them. So, a lot of times, when we ask something, it ends up needing to be escalated regardless because it'll be of a significant technical nature. 

So sometimes you take a little while to get to it. But it's not that it would be unexpected; I have to wait to get it sent to the proper owner. 

Moreover, the responses and they answer their questions with good answers, and they don't, like, we don't get that typical BS right around where they just ask us stupid question questions that could make us wait.

They're gonna put that clear up in and ask relevant questions, and they're actually really good.

Positive

The GUI is easy enough if you're a small company; the initial setup would be fine. It took us a little while to get our deploy pipeline the way we wanted it to be automatic so that individuals don't have to do the configuration. It comes along with our application deployment. 

So, if we're small, it's fine. The GUI is adequate and intuitive enough, and then as you grow and expand and evolve, you obviously wanna go towards using their API to deliver your configuration changes.

In our case, we deployed both on the prem version as well as the cloud. At one time, we did an on-prem version. We got rid of it because the value proposition wasn't there for the cost. We've now gone completely with their hosted infrastructure. Like, we don't do anything on-prem anymore. 

We were like, we were very few companies that did the on-prem. But it was last year; we got rid of it because it wasn't something we needed to continue with.

The deployment process was a while back. It was fine.  Fastly was very good at what it did. 

Deploying something like that is nontrivial because you gotta coordinate hardware installs and circuits when things like that.  

We have a good team for the deployment process. We had three or four people on that team that were on that project.

The pricing has been very competitive.  

I would recommend reading up on the core functionality of the product and then mapping that to your business use case. And, particularly, cache keys are things you wanna look at. Your cache keys are well thought out so that you don't have something too specific, and you also don't want something too general.  

We've had that problem in the past where our cache keys aren't specific enough or are too general, so we go to clear cache, and we're clearing more things than we should.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten because I like this product. 

We use Fastly to track the logs to get the details in case of malware attacks.

The product helps our organization to access sites located in different regions quickly. It makes the sites more reliable.

Fastly's UI is reliable. We can use coding with Terraform to configure it with ease.

Fastly's customer service area needs improvement. They should respond faster. They take time to organize internal team meetings after we raise the ticket.

We have been using Fastly for three years.

I rate Fastly's stability a nine out of ten.

I rate Fastly's scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support services need improvement. We encounter issues while communicating with them regarding different time zones.

Neutral

The initial setup process is straightforward.

Fastly is less expensive than Akamai.

I rate Fastly an eight out of ten. I advise others to go for Cloudflare if their application is hosted on AWS. They should evaluate Akamai as well. They must decide which product to choose based on price and use cases.