Fastly Ships First Compute@Edge Product

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For those who are still holding positions in Fastly (FSLY), this article appeared today announcing the first deliverable in Compute@Edge.

You can find the entire article here:
Cont’d: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fastly-ships-first-product-bu…

A few snippets

Fastly Ships Its First Product Built in Compute@Edge, Unlocking Significant Development Efficiencies and Valuable Customer Benefits

Nearline Cache delivers fast performance, global scale, predictable cost and turnkey operations for customers, and validates the high-velocity development benefits of Compute@Edge

Nearline Cache, a storage solution for customers with large content libraries, like streaming media, gaming, and software companies. Nearline Cache was built in the same serverless compute environment that forms the foundation of Fastly’s ground-breaking Compute@Edge product, enabling Fastly’s product development team to deliver a host of customer benefits and realize significant development and operational efficiencies.

Building Nearline Cache in Compute@Edge validates the foundational promise of the technology to enable breakthrough innovations at scale more easily and quickly. Compute@Edge allowed Fastly to deliver the global scale and high performance customers require, while also reducing their operational overhead and eliminating the unpredictable costs typical with competing solutions. The advantages for Fastly were accelerated development time, global service deployment in seconds, and the ability to fully leverage the power of Fastly’s high-performance, software defined global network.

"It is a really strong proof point for the value of Compute@Edge and Fastly’s ability to innovate faster - it’s a differentiator we plan on leveraging across our product lines, including security, delivery and compute.

Compute@Edge provides a 100x faster code execution startup time than other serverless solutions. And customers gain unprecedented visibility into app development through granular real-time metrics, logging and tracing.

I’m not sure how they can prove that last quote (100x faster).

This may be a nothing burger, and perhaps long overdue, but if there are more of these coming it could bode nicely for the stock.

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I’m still holding a small position just to keep Fastly on my radar. I have to say this press release is pretty underwhelming. We’ve been waiting a long time in internet terms for Compute@Edge. And as far as I’m concerned, we are still waiting for specific compelling examples of use cases and benefits. Not hype, but specifics. If this technology is really as good as they keep telling us it is, those compelling examples should not be hard to find. But while we’ve been waiting for them to actually deploy this technology and make it widely available, their competition has deployed effective solutions that are very sticky. I’m willing to be proven wrong, but I am just not seeing anything yet that merits another round of hype from Fastly.

Regards,

Dorset

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Hi Dorset,
When you wrote we are still waiting for specific compelling examples of use cases and benefits. Not hype, but specifics. regarding Fastly, I couldn’t help but think of this example at Devloper Week for Cloudflare. I haven’t seen it referenced on this Board and am wondering if this is specific enough to qualify for the type of example your asking for from Fastly?

I paraphrases this into my notes; but the link is pretty tightly focused in this area.

Workers Unbound (general purpose compute)->30sec, went GA ( became Generally Available).
Examples of their soon to be available >15minutes compute (which is now in Beta): Utilizing WebAssembly in Severless, some are building apps to pair genomics data to bio-informatics capabilities.
See here:
https://cloudflare.tv/event/50dxLTVVt8qvXr2mz1CbBy
I was happy to see the WebAssembly language pointed out. My understanding is that Fastly had more sophisticated tech, perhaps not much longer?

Best,

Jason

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This sounds a lot like a CDN solution, but perhaps for customers to use for their own purposes versus website content caching? The thing is, their CDN was already built on this tech, right? so is this just a repackaged product?

Now this is anecdotal, and perhaps I’m being too hard on them, but this sounds like a marketing department pressuring developers to put out a release of any kind so they can call it “delivered“. That said, even if this is all true, releasing a product does take a lot of work so perhaps this could be looked at as sort of “breaking the seal“ to lay down more pipeline to product release.

Cloudflare is still years ahead here. If anyone sees something in this news that is innovative or cutting edge please point it out!

“I’m not sure how they can prove that last quote (100x faster).”

This is measurable. I assume they’re comparing their “instances” to “containers” (eg Docker) or virtual machines, which are much slower, but that is old news here.

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As someone living in a European capital and with the knowledge that TMF use Fastly then as a piece of anecdotal evidence then the response time for this site is extremely poor.
Worse than before they started to use it, in fact.
I know that they do far more than just providing fast response times for websites but if they can’t even do that then I’ll remain on the sidelines after selling all my FSLY stock and investing in NET last year.
Cheers, PB.

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