Fastly is growing rapidly, probably faster than any other CDN in the ecosystem. They have 80+ employees and counting; and are pushing 166Gbps of bandwidth. The bandwidth dashboard on the Fastly homepage provides us with a visualization of their rapid growth. Early last month, Fastly was pushing about 125Gbps, so that is quite an improvement over a short period of time. Also, now that they’re in the streaming business, they’ll most likely reach 500Gbps of bandwidth by year end.
In my book, any CDN pushing 500Gbps/month of sustained bandwidth, is part of an elite group of CDNs, that has reached a major growth milestone, alongside EdgeCast and CloudFlare. Honestly, I think Fastly is going to reach Limelight Networks, and surpass them in two years. The Fastly team is passionate, dedicated, smart, and extremely hungry for new business. They remind me of EdgeCast and Cotendo. This of course is my gut feeling. And that is unless Limelight has something under its sleeve, and does something really unexpected that surprises the CDN industry.
Next Phase of Fastly
Akamai is the #1 CDN, EdgeCast is #2, and Limelight is #3. Now that EdgeCast is part of Verizon, it’s no longer a pure-play CDN in theory, thus making Limelight the #2 pure-play CDN. Currently, Limelight is focused on stabilizing its’ revenue stream, and reducing employee churn. It’s also doing a technology refresh on it’s feature set. This leaves an opening for another CDN to come in and take the #2 pure-play CDN spot, supplanting Limelight. I think it might be Fastly.
Fastly is doing a phenomenal job right now. At this point, my only recommendation is they start working on a WAF offering, to be available by year end. Also, Fastly needs to start planning on expanding the security feature set. If Fastly can do with security what it has done with CDN, and become a strong Security Based CDN, their going to be a billion dollar company once they go public. For insight on the type of security feature set they should evaluate, they need to look no further than Incapsula.