At the moment until I read something well reasoned to dissuade me I think the TikTok risk to fsly is overblown for a number of reasons.
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While TikTok is a large (12%) part of fsly that will take only about a quarter to grow past assuming that tomorrow FSLY loses all of that revenue.
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I don’t think MSFT will be able to move TikTok off of fsly in the near to medium term. See below for more reasoning.
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I think there is a relatively small chance that TikTok will truly be banned. Legal issues, political issues, etc.
tl:dr Catastrophe has already been priced in and I don’t think catastrophe is likely in the near termRather if MSFT acquires TikTok then they may slowly move capabilities to azure over time.
Tiktok has almost assuredly developed their infrastructure for fsly. I have no idea how it is configured but if they are taking any advantage at all of fsly’s remarkably fast cold starts then the switch to azure will require quite a bit of engineering. On fsly they can engineer to things that start up in microseconds with a very small memory footprint. Azure’s cold starts are measured in milliseconds to seconds …a thousand to million times slow down. Memory use can be a similar story, fsly in the kilobyte range vs megabyte range for azure…a 1000 time difference.
I’m not suggesting that Tiktok would be a thousand to a million times slower on azure. Certain things that Tiktok does probably are not possible on azure so they would have to rewrite them and they would have to rewrite them in a way that would consume way more resources. Rewriting will take time and depending on the final form may consume so many resources that it is more feasible to continue using fsly until azure beefs up their serverless offerings. Caveats are…1)I don’t have any insight into tiktoks architecture other than they use fsly so I assume they are using fsly because of its advantages. 2)I have no idea what azure’s dev path looks like and how far along they are in developing fsly like capabilities
https://softwarestackinvesting.com/fastly-edge-compute-expla…
Message by You: https://azure.microsoft.com/is-is/blog/understanding-serverl…, Thursday, August 6 2020, 7:43 AM
https://azure.microsoft.com/is-is/blog/understanding-serverl…
E
Message by You: https://mikhail.io/serverless/coldstarts/azure/, Thursday, August 6 2020, 7:44 AM
https://mikhail.io/serverless/coldstarts/azure/
I’m not a software engineer so those of you that are in this profession please weigh in and correct any misconceptions.
best,
EThan