Fastly vs Akamai
Fastly vs Akamai – this is a typical question prospective CDN buyers may ask themselves when considering which content delivery network provider is best for their needs. Both Akamai and Fastly have developed strong CDNs with unique selling points, allowing them to carve out specific sections of the market and to develop their specialities. This makes the Fastly vs Akamai question very difficult, as both have strong positive attributes when it comes to their network and services. In this short article, I’ll be looking at the two CDN providers and comparing their content delivery networks to try and answer the question of Fastly vs Akamai.
Fastly vs Akamai: Network
Both Fastly and Akamai have built their technology and service on highly sophisticated and far reaching networks. This means that they offer high performance whilst enabled customers to deliver data all around the globe with ease.
Fastly’s network consists of 22 points of presence located around the globe, and another 8 under construction. These are in North America, Europe, Asia and Oceania, with African and South American PoPs to follow shortly. All of Fastly’s PoPs are placed at points with the highest densities of web traffic, and peering agreements T1 providers ensuring lightning fast response times.
The Akamai CDN is equally well formed, Owned and operated by Akamai, it is made of over 100,000 servers in more than 80 countries around the world. This means that the Akamai CDN covers all the world’s continents, except Antarctica.
Fastly vs Akamai: Customers
With such comprehensive networks, it’s clear that Fastly and Akamai attract high profile customers including the most trusted names from a variety of industries.
Fastly’s customer list includes GitHub, Lonely Planet, The Guardian, Vimeo, Upworthy, Stirpe, Wikia, Yammer, Disqus and Shazam.
Akamai, not to be outdone, counts Elance, Red Hat, IBM, Adobe, Trulia, EMC, Siemens, Informatica, Autodesk and Sophos amongst their customers.
Fastly vs Akamai: Technology
Advanced technologies are what make modern content delivery networks so powerful, and Fastly is no stranger to innovation and advanced tech. Their CDN and servers are built upon high speed solid state drives, enabling data to be cached and retrieved faster than standard servers that feature older platter-based hard drives.
Akamai, on the other hand, has opted to optimise their data delivery, utilising TCP connection optimisation, pre-fetching and route optimisation, amongst other tech. This ensure data gets through the network as quickly as possible.