Fastly Edge Cloud Platform vs. NGINX

The service is really well-suited for pretty much any site that is primarily display-driven (that is, mostly GET requests). The network is able to handle massive volumes of traffic and their POPs have spread out pretty much anywhere that it's easy to get them (so basically everywhere but China and Russia). My team witnessed several large-scale attack attempts on some high-profile websites (attacks in the 10s of millions of requests per second) that were mitigated before ever coming back to the actual application; in one case we didn't realize the attack had happened until we looked at the logs the next day. Because it's a cache store option, the default configuration does not cache POST responses, and it can be difficult to set up things like authenticated paywalls as a result.

Incentivized

[NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.

Incentivized

• Comprehensive API.
• Feature-rich UI.
• Excellent documentation.
• Fine-grained custom VCL.

Incentivized

• Straight-forward configuration format that users of all skill levels can learn, and yet is powerful enough for the huge breadth of features that Nginx provides.
• Massive scale right out the box. We've never had a Nginx instance overwhelmed by requests, and if we did it would be trivial to spin up more Nginx instances to handle the load.
• SSL termination means that we can deliver content over HTTPS without needing our individual services to require TLS support. This saves us a lot of time and headache while keeping us secure.
• Nginx is open-source and free, meaning that anyone can use it to power their services, from individual projects to billion-dollar websites.

Incentivized

• Setup can be difficult -- but only because the service is so robust and provides so many features.
• Minimum spend is $50/month, even if you are not using the service enough to have spent the $50.

Incentivized

• Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
• I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
• It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
• It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
• I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.

Great value for the product

Incentivized

Fastly Edge Cloud Platform is a powerful tool with robust capabilities, but it requires deep technical knowledge to integrate effectively into existing applications. While its performance and features are excellent, the lack of a user-friendly interface and the need for advanced configuration can make it challenging for teams without experienced developers.

Incentivized

This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers

Incentivized

Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.

Incentivized

Fastly is a great choice for CDN vendor when performance and has the ability to quickly invalidate an asset from all POPs very quickly. It shines in use cases that require media delivery, like video. Fastly also provides a highly-optimized way to handle logical operations at the edge, meaning that, for example, quick authorization checks can be handled without having to work with the origin server.

Incentivized

All of those are paid solutions with very good features, but they also offer dedicated scenarios for web application hosting. If you run applications on on-premises web servers and don't have a Microsoft licence agreement, Nginx is a very good and reliable option, based on Linux distributions and available as freeware.

Incentivized

• While I was at Wanelo we were able to put Fastly in front of the growing web app, and selectively cache end points to improve stability and performance. In the meantime we rewrote the app completely in Ruby. We wouldn’t have been able to do that without Fastly.

Incentivized

• Our websites are noticeably faster, causing an increase in customer satisfaction.
• Nginx has such a low memory/resource footprint that we save money from not needing multiple large, expensive servers.
• Ability to load balance traffic, have server-redundancy, and have high-availability allows for 100% uptime and provides cost-effective solutions to alternatives that can cost a lot.

Incentivized