$FSLY My own rudimentary understanding: Fastly is built by developers, for developers. The founders wanted a frictionless method to enable other developers to deliver applications uniquely, speedily, on a global scale, and securely.

Legacy CDNs were not up to task - they were not programmable, hence developers could not write their own code or design their application in a way they wanted.

As developers, Fastly understood that importance and gave that power back into hands of developers. Fastly’s edge cloud platform is designed from ground up to allow developers to write their own code and deliver apps from the edge. That’s the first moat

The second moat is that Fastly runs all their servers on a single software-defined network, not multiple networks. That’s also why it has significantly fewer POPs than legacy CDN providers, since theirs are more efficient, inter-connected, and scalable.

This allows their enterprise customers to accommodate traffic spikes by rapidly distributing content requests across their network. They also are capable of intelligently routing traffic across different cloud providers, or between cloud & on prem data centre

The third moat is Fastly’s integrated security solution that allow developers to see real time what’s happening to their networks. This allows real time response to security threats, as opposed to “batch systems where you’re waiting on hours to see or react”

Lastly, it’s really the ease of onboarding and implementation. Fastly is able to onboard customers within minutes, and all done online. No wonder their customers are so pleased with their service

Fastly could be building the railways of a modern internet infrastructure run on the edge, and given its profile of customers, I’m inclined to believe they would have a sizable market share in future. The era of edge computing may be nearer than we think.