Fastly is a provider of cloud computing services that was founded in 2011 by Swedish-American entrepreneur Artur Bergman.
The company describes its content delivery network (CDN) as an edge cloud platform that enables developers to extend their cloud infrastructure closer to users.
Fastly posted Q1 2022 revenue of $102.4 million with the platform powering a fast, secure, and scalable experience and handling billions of requests daily.
Who are its main competitors in terms of CDN providers? Letโs find out.
Akamai
Founded in 1998, Akamai has an extensive network of data centers and servers around the world.
These are hired out to online enterprises and eCommerce companies who desire faster, smoother load times and content distribution.
Features include API acceleration, real-time load testing, performance monitoring, intelligent load balancing, and an image and video manager that optimizes content on any device.
Akamai is a major Fastly competitor with full-year revenue for 2021 at $3.5 billion.
Notable clients include NBC, Lufthansa, Fox, The Washington Post, Honda, and Dominoโs.
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudFront is a CDN network with low latency and high transfer speeds. Some of the platformโs features include:
- Reduced latency via more than 310 global Points of Presence (PoPs) with intelligent routing and automated network mapping.
- Increased security thanks to traffic encryption and access controls.
- DDoS attack protection with AWS Shield Standard.
- Customizable code with serverless compute features that allow companies to better balance performance and security with cost.
Amazon is also a significant CDN player with clients such as Reuters, Slack, King, and Hulu.
Cloudflare CDN
According to the company website, Cloudflare is the worldโs fastest content delivery network with ultra-fast dynamic and static content delivery.
The network is API-first, which means customers can automate workflows with precision and control.
They can also reduce their bandwidth costs and utilize Cloudflareโs unmetered DDoS protection.
In 2021, Cloudflare CDN was recognized by Gartner Peer Insights with the Customersโ Choice award. Some of these customers include Mars, Garmin, IBM, Shopify, and Zendesk.
Microsoft Azure CDN
Microsoft’s Azure platform consists of more than 200 products and cloud services to help businesses manage applications either on-premise or at the edge.
Security on Azure is first class and is trusted by enterprises, start-ups, and governments, while the open-source nature of the platform allows clients to customize their products to suit any language or framework.
Some 95% of Fortune 500 companies use Azure across the healthcare, government, retail, manufacturing, and financial services industries.
Netlify
Netlify is a relatively young cloud computing company that was founded in 2014 by Mathias Biilmann and Christian Bach.
The companyโs platform, dubbed Netlify Edge, is fast, secure, resilient, and reliable, with clients such as Smashing Magazine receiving a 1000% boost in site performance from its automated prerendering.
Netlify Edge is distributed like a CDN but with advanced functionality for publishing applications and entire sites.
Maintenance windows, stale content, and broken deploys are negated since every global deploy is an instant update of the application.
With worldwide caches invalidated instantly, Edge has a traditional CDN covered in terms of its ability to support richer applications.
Key takeaways:
- Fastly is a provider of cloud computing services that was founded in 2011 by Swedish-American entrepreneur Artur Bergman.
- Akamai is a major Fastly competitor with billions in annual revenue and an established client base. Amazon CloudFront and Microsoft Azure are also worthy competitors because of their heritage in cloud computing and respected brand names.
- Other competitors include Cloudflare, with the worldโs fastest content delivery network, and Netlify, a relative newcomer that enables clients to put their entire site on a CDN with and optimize the serving of their assets.
Read More: Fastly Business Model, Enterprise Business Model.
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