Cloudflare, Fastly among CDNs set to become key edge development platform as market grows

According to Chris Drake, Principal Analyst at GlobalData, the exponential growth is linked with a growing interest from companies in new applications. “These include applications that leverage large amounts of data, and those that depend on real-time data processing capabilities, such as autonomous, driverless vehicles and virtual, augmented and mixed reality (VR, AR, XR) applications,” Drake said.

In terms of actors driving this growth, Drake mentioned IT infrastructure vendors, as well as telecoms network operators, cloud service providers, systems integrators, and content delivery networks (CDNs).

Edge development platforms evaluated

The latter vendor category, according to a separate report from Forrester Research, has several CDNs focusing efforts in an attempt to become the edge development platform of choice.

The document analyzed nine participating vendors based on ten criteria. Both Cloudflare and Fastly were declared leaders in the edge development platform market. Several companies touted their positioning in the various categories. Notably, Akamai was not cited as a leader, despite being the biggest CDN vendor in the market. Also absent from the evaluation altogether were Lumen Technologies, which has partnered with Section.io for its edge development platform capabilities. Following are the report’s main highlights.

Cloudflare named a ‘Leader’ for web and content workloads

The company was nominated for achieving high scores in several areas, including developer experience, programming model, platform execution model, integrations, and ‘day-two-plus’ experience.

The Forrester New Wave report describes Cloudflare as “the best fit for companies that need global support for web and content workloads.”

According to the report, the global reach of Cloudflare’s edge development platform makes it a good solution for development teams interested in building high-performance websites, supporting personalized content, and defending against malicious attacks.

The company also recently announced an extension of its network to bring its edge solutions to the office building.

Fastly receives differentiated rating in the security criterion

The company was given the highest score across vision, roadmap, developer experience, platform execution model, and day-two-plus experience.

Fastly was also the only company among those mentioned in the report to receive a differentiated rating in the security criterion.

Forrester wrote that Fastly’s Compute@Edge platform offers secure edge computing with negligible cold starts, as well as starting within the time it takes to complete a transport layer security handshake.

“The result: no more pre-warming for maximum serverless performance. Fastly’s custom-built runtime isolates requests on a per-instance basis and supports Rust and Javascript software development kits,” the report reads.

The recognition follows a similar one Fastly received last month from Gartner.

Azion’s platform recognized for global edge performance

Brazil-based Azion isn’t as well known as other providers in the group but has been growing rapidly based on growth in South America. In the recent Forrester report, Azion Technologies was listed as a “Best fit for teams that need global edge performance.”

The company was awarded the mention thanks to its capabilities for dynamic web and content workloads.

“Developers can run Azion Cells on hosted edge infrastructure or as a hybrid-cloud runtime on their own infrastructure,” the report stated.

The mention comes weeks after Azion teamed up with Radware to block bots at the network edge.

StackPath named ‘Strong Performer’ for roadmap efforts

Forrester assessed StackPath Edge Compute and named the company as one of the nine top providers in this emerging space. The report states that “StackPath is the best fit for companies that need more options at the edge.”

It also mentions how developers that use StackPath can deploy containers and virtual machines (VMs) or use built-in serverless scripting to deploy edge computing.

“StackPath can also terminate multiple types of inbound protocols, which makes it flexible for a wide variety of edge workloads.”

According to Forrester, the firm’s edge infrastructure is a good solution for companies that need to support more than HTTPS edge workloads.

“Machine learning model execution and IoT connectivity are examples where StackPath is ideal.”

StackPath has recently hired Tom Reyes as Chief Transformation Officer, who will aid in strengthening its position in the edge computing market.

Article Topics

Akamai  |  Azion Technologies  |  CDN  |  Cloudflare  |  DevOps  |  edge application  |  edge platform  |  Fastly  |  Forrester Research  |  Lumen  |  StackPath