> Today, we’re excited to report that Cloudflare Workers is 196% faster than Fastly’s Compute@Edge based on the time to first byte from the tests we ran on 50 nodes using Catchpoint’s data from across the world.
Kind of? At minimum they made misleading representations. They used abbreviated explanations of how they're better and then expanded on what the test actually consisted of later on.
Fastly does not have a production-ready JavaScript product. From their blog post,
> Their tests compare JavaScript running on Cloudflare Workers, a mature, generally available product, with JavaScript running on Compute@Edge. Although the Compute@Edge platform is now available for all in production, support for JavaScript on Compute@Edge is a beta product. We clearly identify in our documentation [2] that beta products are not ready for production use. A fairer test on this point would have compared Rust on Compute@Edge with JavaScript on Cloudflare Workers, which are at more comparable stages of the product lifecycle.
Restricting any comparison isn't satisfactory since we care about both the supported languages and performance. Let there be writeups about both and allow users to make up our own minds.
I think the Cloudflare article [2] could be amended to refer to the compared product as "Fastly's JavaScript on Compute@Edge" and all would be fine. Fastly will probably still say they advise against this comparison since it's "beta". Nonetheless, we should all feel free to compare publicly available products and write about them.
I don't really think it's worth piling on the topic more, but Fastly's post (original topic) expands on why the test is poor in other ways worth reading over again.
Beyond just those points, the whole Cloudflare blog post reads like an attempt at a performance sales kill sheet. (In other words, their sales may point to this as to why folks should choose Cloudflare Workers over Fastly Compute@Edge.)
> Fastly's post (original topic) expands on why the test is poor in other ways worth reading over again.
Do you want to highlight any of those? RTT is mentioned in a post from "Cloudflare Research" which was just shared by their head of research [1].
> Beyond just those points, the whole Cloudflare blog post reads like an attempt at a performance sales kill sheet. (In other words, their sales may point to this as to why folks should choose Cloudflare Workers over Fastly Compute@Edge.)
There is nothing wrong with advertising. This comment section is just about keeping them honest.
