[saurik]

And good luck getting Akamai to call you back if you don't have significant amounts of traffic.

Look, I realize this notion sounds right and fits with the common dogma about Akamai, but it is actually a lie: I have personally had long conversations with Akamai negotiating deals where I would have had no minimum commitment (although there were other totally reasonable non-monetary concessions involved), and their prices still beat the ones on your website (albeit only by a sliver).

(By the way, I am going to explicitly point out that if you had stopped after your first paragraph about how your API is different, I would now have just apologized and been interested to learn more about why people needed that, but this obvious and totally incorrect FUD about peoples' abilities to negotiate workable deals with Akamai is really bothering me. I wasn't actually "anti-fastly" before: I just found it expensive and confusing... but now?)

[tyler]

I'm sorry that my statement is bothering you. I'm going based on numerous conversations with people considering using Fastly. It's quite possible that I have a skewed sample, however I'm not intentionally spreading FUD, for what that's worth.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor

[sintaks]

Also, that "2 billion requests per day" might sound silly to someone who serves that in an hour...

[tyler]

We like to think that the exact number of requests is less important than exactly how they're handled. While it would be cool to go "we serve a billion requests a second", we're still an early stage startup. We're spending more time making our responses even faster (< 1ms on the 99th percentile) and trying to provide things that no one else does (for instance, instant purging and surrogate key purging).

[sintaks]

I must say - that kind of perf is superb, though top percentile and averages aren't super representative of the average customer's experience. What are your tp50 and tp90 like?

Your sub-150ms invalidation is equally if not more impressive, especially if you're talking about multi-region invalidation.

[tyler]

TTFB at the 50th hovers around 175 microseconds, 75th is at 250 microseconds, 95th around 450 microseconds.

As for the purging stuff, I do mean cross-region. So, it depends upon which node receives your purge request. 150ms is average, but really it's "network latency plus a millisecond or so".

[sintaks]

Wait, so 95% of your customers experience a TTFB of less than 500 microseconds (tp95 of 450 microseconds)? I just want to make sure I'm understanding you correctly. Because that's awesome.

[tyler]

95% of requests. But yeah! And thank you. :)