300 pops around the world delivering 210 Tbps of capacity, mitigation of some of the largest DDoS attacks in history, 20% of internet traffic. Workers, Pages, R2, D1, Zero Trust, Stream, Images, Warp, 1.1.1.1, etc, etc, etc - all at incredible scale.
But yes, of course you have been doing the exact same thing since before Prince was born.
Look at a historical graph of internet users, bandwidth, etc. "Same scale long before" just isn't possible.
I'm not saying there isn't Cloudfront, Akamai, Fastly, Azure Edge/Verizon, etc. Hell UUNet, whatever you want. I'm saying the idea of someone providing hundreds of terabits of connectivity, connecting to over 12,000 networks, and supporting what is likely at least a billion users before Prince was born is completely absurd and impossible. There were only 118 million telephones worldwide in 1958 (the year Prince was born)[0].
I'm not referring to "DevOps crap". I'm referring to a wide product suite of functionality and geographic spread and scale that at best even 20 years ago would have taken an army of sysadmins and developers to build and maintain with a staggering fleet of Linux boxes running LAMP or whatever you prefer.
I was a very early Fastly customer (~2013 or so). I continue to look at them from time to time and what Oracle has done to them is atrocious (yet typical). They clearly have some usage and market share within that target market.
Speaking of market share, Cloudflare gets the most attention because they (by far) have the largest market share in terms of CDN/DDoS/etc and anything they do has the most significant impact on internet users at large. Depending on your source Cloudflare has roughly 50% of "CDN" marketshare, Fastly has something in the single digit percent range. Even Amazon CloudFront is around half that of Cloudflare.
Between Oracle and having less than 1/10th the market share that's why no one talks about Fastly. Compared to Cloudflare they're essentially irrelevant unless you're one of Oracle's enterprise customers that will deal with their sales people and tactics.
I was confused at first how Prince is relevant, but it seems GP is referring to the CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, who was born in 1974. (1958 appears to be the birth year of Prince the musician)
