On Fastly vs CDN debate, to me its focused on developer community - allowing developers to write custom code, integrate that with Fastly infrastructure - was a big big tie breaker.
On this board, we have seen few astounding winners with this strategy… TWLO is on top of the list…
If you read Peter Offringa’s article on Fastly, he clarifies why developers prefer Fastly which not only allows them to customize, but do so very easily and delivers much better performance due to its ultra-fast server start technology
(I am not a techie… so may be paraphrasing something here based on what I understood)…
Shopify and other use cases articulated by Fastly and explained by Peter clearly says that this is not vanilla CDN… it is already, true edge service platform with high degree of programmability…
those (including Beth) saying this is old CDN haven’t take time to understand FSLY (btw, I was in the same boat two months back, so I do relate to the thought process)…
And FSLY management clearly identified that they are premier pricing, they don’t really get the volume based, price sensitive CDN business and their expectations are for gross margins to further improve all the way into 70% range… which is clearly not a CDN play…
Can others catch up and beat FSLY, yes, but it can take a long time and even then, with all the custom code written on FSLY infrastructure, their existing client work loads likely sustained… cost of switching increases with time… that is not vanilla CDN…
I see FSLY as super leveraged play on e-commerce, WFH, online gaming, 5G and digital transformation… If there is a pure play company that benefits from each one of these, it is FSLY… I wouldn’t want to get scared out of CDN comparison at this stage…
nilvest
PS: I have ~4% position in FSLY… and looking to build larger position, though it is hard for me to take money out of my larger positions like LVGO, CRWD and DDOG to put into FSLY!!