Fastly, founded in 2011, is a so-called next Generation CDN, providing acceleration and video services. It was originally built addressing a DevOps audience given its technical foundation over it’ ‘Varnish’ technology and strong focus on APIs. Fastly uses web application accelerator Varnish, and allows clients to upload their custom VCL (Varnish Configuration Language) to the Fastly platform. Currently, there is one alternative to Fastly when it comes to uploading custom VCLs, and that is ‘developer CDN’ section.io

Metrics consistently show Akamai performing better than Fastly.

Fastly suffers frequent outages or service degradation that are publicly exposed on Fastly’s website.

Independent performance metric tools consistently show that Fastly performs slower than Akamai. Using Fastly over Akamai could negatively affect customers’ revenue generation.

As of March 2015, Fastly is serving daily peaks of ~455 Gbps which means around 70 times less than Akamai daily traffic. Fastly limited platform may lead to insufficient capacity when it receives high volume of traffic or volumetric attacks.

Fastly’s limited platform also means lack of security or its own DNS solutions; so its overall product offering is limited.

Fastly has POPs in 35 locations on 6 continents, with an exceptionally strong presence in Oceania (6 POPs).

Only UK POP is London. Akamai has 254 POPs in the UK alone.