She has some good things to say about ZM.
Around the 27:00 min mark she also has some good things to say about DDOG and some concerns about FSLY–mostly about FSLY being focused on streaming/content delivery and not a true cloud company–and subject to pricing pressures associated with classic content delivery network companies.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4355130-cloud-and-zoom-shif…
and some concerns about FSLY–mostly about FSLY being focused on streaming/content delivery and not a true cloud company
If Fastly is Edge then it is not Cloud. Edge exists to solve some of Cloud’s shortcomings.
Have you ever experienced the delay of a telephone conversation over a satellite link? That’s one of the Cloud issues that Edge solves, latency. The other is the cost of long distance data transmission – as in streaming/content delivery.
Denny Schlesinger
To understand Fastly, you have to read Peter Offringa’s blog.
As good as Beth is, she is still quite generalist…
Peter understand this much better and traded large portion of his personal holding from AYX to FSLY.
Peter understand this much better and traded large portion of his personal holding from AYX to FSLY.
Nilvest, Peter did re-allocate some of his AYX into FSLY/TWLO but, not a large portion:
“ I will shift a portion of my large AYX allocation in the near term to other stocks that recently outperformed (TWLO, FSLY) in order to balance out my positions.”
Just wanted to clarify that. Overall, he’s holding most of his AYX position.
Brians…
Today, I see FSLY at top with 36% and AYX second at 17% on this page
(scroll down to personal holding)
https://softwarestackinvesting.com/software-stock-recommenda…
a month ago (or may be longer than that), it was showing AYX at 35%
I am sure this will change and the point is not to follow anyone specific to the %… my point is that this guy (Peter) seems to know this space extremely well and I noticed he dramatically upgraded his holding into FSLY (sometime in the near past) per his blog.
Re Softwarestack Investing
A note. There are two write ups of Fastly on the site. Be sure to read the earlier one. I found it to be very instructive . A good intro to Edge computing and Fastly’s approach’
.
https://softwarestackinvesting.com/software-stock-recommenda……
Disclosure: I own both FSLY and NET. My position in FSLY is 2.25X the size of my NET position.
Thesis: I believe strongly in the paradigm that brings computing and data storage closer and closer to the location where it is needed and when it is needed in an effort to increase efficiencies and speed. I see this need only growing in the future as lower and lower latency will be required for IoT and AI.
My Background: Commercial Real Estate with very little technical understanding of various technology oriented companies I have been investing in.
Post Background: I recently engaged in a investing forum discussion with Beth Kindig. At the time, I believe I may have been gloating a bit about how smart I was to have invested in FSLY in February and then added substantially to my position during the Covid Correction in March. I presented why I was excited about FSLY and the fact that the recent FSLY announcements pertaining to increased capacity and increased speed were cause for an even more optimistic view of FSLY’s future.
My Bursted Bubble: In her professional and informative response to me, Beth outlined a number of reasons why she was not as enthusiastic about FSLY. Her primary points included: 1.) Edge computing will come from those companies with compute servers that already handle intensive computation workloads (i.e. microdata centers). 2.) FSLY makes CDN tasks better/easier as FSLY moves into low/no code. 3.) Skeptical that FSLY is improving CDNs to cache and deliver content closer/faster to the edge. 4.) A FSLY use case such as Shopify is not a strong use case since e-commerce is not computationally intensive compared to running an autonomous vehicle, which is what edge computing will deliver. 4.) Not convinced that CDN will be a leader fulfilling this need, in fact, real edge computing players could make CDNs obsolete as once compute servers are at the edge, CDNs may not be needed any longer. 5.) FSLY is currently benefiting from surge in e-commerce and content consumption/streaming. And there is not much edge computing going on beyond just faster content streaming and/or lower latency for content.
NOTE: Beth indicates that these are her thoughts, she is open to being wrong since she is not a specialist and is continuing to do research in this area of edge computing.
Request: For more technically inclined members of Saul’s board; would anyone like to take this technical “bear” argument and present the technical “bull” case for FSLY? I am not able to do so, but I think members of the board that have interest in edge computing would find input and responses to be helpful. Let’s just keep it in the realm of technological merit. I am not sure that an exercise in discussions for or against an individual or a service are necessary.
I’m not an expert here, but I’ll wade in with some thoughts:
1.) Edge computing will come from those companies with compute servers that already handle intensive computation workloads (i.e. microdata centers).
Edge computing is more than just having computers close to the endpoints. There’s a tricky combination of what you do at the edge and what you still need from the central computer/database. This is where CDNs have some advantages, as they already have figured out how to balance what to store close to the endpoint and when to go back to the central server. Now instead of applying that to images, they’re applying it to compute cycles. As most compute requests will be unique, the legacy method of simply caching something requested once won’t work, so the more modern CDN architectures have advantages here.
2.) FSLY makes CDN tasks better/easier as FSLY moves into low/no code.
Not sure I see see Fastly as a low/no code provider. Fastly was built by developers for developers. Documentation, sample code, etc. are all online. I believe Fastly uses best of breed tools, but I haven’t seen any push by them to use 4th generation or other low code services. Maybe this is indeed something they’re working on, so that common use cases can be implemented by customers more easily. I don’t know how that would adversely affect Fastly’s ability to provide edge compute services
3.) Skeptical that FSLY is improving CDNs to cache and deliver content closer/faster to the edge.
This sounds like someone who is believing Akamai and other legacy CDN vendors in the out-dated belief that more POPs (Points of Presence) is the only/best way to deliver content faster. I have discussed Fastly’s approach in other posts here, but essentially, Fastly has their own internet backbone, built on top of Arista and Fastly owns their own SDN code.
4.) A FSLY use case such as Shopify is not a strong use case since e-commerce is not computationally intensive compared to running an autonomous vehicle, which is what edge computing will deliver.
Well, the NY Times is a better use case. Fastly enables subscribers to log-in on one of Fastly’s edge servers without having to tap the NY Times’ own central computer every time. Legacy CDNs depending on a hit cache can’t do this because a) still have to hit the central server the first time anyone logs on, and b) how does the edge know the cache is still valid (that is, whether the user’s account is still active, or was canceled, for instance)? Fastly has lightning quick updates from the central server to all its POPs, so conceivably a user logging into via Fastly does not ever create a hit to the central server.
But, yes, Fastly is new to edge computing. They’re taking their time with Compute@Edge to be sure to get it right - it’s been in Beta for months now. I’m still getting up to speed on it, but if it’s as solid and revolutionary as their CDN offering it could be a game changer.
Finally, I highly doubt that edge computing is going to deliver autonomous driving. We’ve already seen automakers from Tesla to Mercedes going with redundant high-power chips designed to handle neural networks and I doubt that even with 5G anyone would want to risk not just the latency but also the potential network downtime in such a critical situation. Remember that the edge can be the end device itself - edge is not limited to a cell phone tower or micro-data center.
4.) Not convinced that CDN will be a leader fulfilling this need, in fact, real edge computing players could make CDNs obsolete as once compute servers are at the edge, CDNs may not be needed any longer.
That makes no sense to me at all. Spotify, the NY Times, and thousands of web sites will still want the speed optimizations that CDNs provide.
I would like to know the companies Beth thinks are “rea edge computing players,” though. This link, https://stlpartners.com/edge-computing/edge-computing-compan… , covers 15 players - but they’re all small.
5.) FSLY is currently benefiting from surge in e-commerce and content consumption/streaming. And there is not much edge computing going on beyond just faster content streaming and/or lower latency for content.
Is she really saying that Fastly is doing well in a growing market is bad?