Be among the first to try the greatest KV Store ever made
Director of Engineering, Edge State, Fastly
Principal Product Manager, Edge Data, Fastly
When you are orders of magnitude faster, you don’t just build something better, you build something different. And we know you are going to build something amazing because we are going to give you data storage that works like the KV stores you are familiar with, but performs better than anything you have ever seen. Some customers and prospects who evaluated our KV Store reported up to 10X+ faster performance with Fastly’s KV Store versus other edge KV solutions, and based on our methodology we found it to be 30X faster than Akamai. Check out the table below that highlights some of the metrics we captured to understand Fastly’s real-time latency as it relates to read, write, and replication times of the KV Store.
Metric | Description | Result |
Read hit time (key exists) | The time it takes to retrieve the value for a key that exists in the store | < 6 ms |
Write time | The time it takes to store a new key-value pair. | < 315 ms |
Written data replication time | The delay between storing new data and replicating it to other PoPs | < 240 ms |
Update time | The time it takes to modify an existing value for a key. | < 315 ms |
Updated data replication time | The delay between updating data and replicating the changes to other PoPs | < 320 ms |
(Note: Results represent median of observed times using a 12.9 KB value, tested on 1/13/2024. This was a global test of all Fastly POPs weighted equally.)
Benchmark results showcase KV Store’s instant capabilities
We’re not surprised at the results because for more than a decade we have been architecting our network and platform to deliver instant capabilities. This work started with the development of our global network which offers best-in-class programmability and capabilities like instant purge. With the foundation for our instant engine in place, we could then build our Compute platform on top of it, achieving breakthrough performance in code instantiation and secure isolation. Engineering our KV Store on top of this same foundation means that we are using Fastly’s own network, compute, storage and caching which affords us the ability to deliver a lightning-fast solution to our customers.
Half a second is actually faster than 1 minute
One of the metrics we looked at in our testing is updated replication time or the duration it takes for changes made to key-value data to be replicated across all of our globally distributed PoPs. Changes to key-value data are inevitable, and depending on the nature of your business or your application or use case, the frequency of these changes can vary greatly from weekly to daily to every minute or less. In our benchmark tests, the updated data replication time for KV Store was <320 milliseconds which means that we can support some of your most latency-sensitive use cases. Why wait for changes to take a minute or longer with competitive solutions when Fastly delivers this to you instantly in less than half a second!
Can your KV Store do 6ms reads?
Another metric captured in our tests was read hit time, or the time it takes to retrieve a value associated with a given key from the KV Store. Optimizing read hit time is crucial for improving the overall performance and responsiveness of applications, especially for use cases where read operations vastly outnumber write operations. In our benchmark tests, the read hit time for KV Store was less than 6 milliseconds! Performance like this means that we can support apps with higher read loads without affecting your performance, as well as being able to scale seamlessly as your user base grows.
Faster grows your business
We didn’t make the KV Store faster because it is cool - although it is cool. It’s because it translates into real business value. We’re super proud of the success our customers have achieved with KV Store like Brad’s Deals, an online shopping platform, that saw a 95% improvement in web page relevance by moving redirects to the edge. Redirects are a fairly simple use case for KV Store, but they can have a huge impact on SEO and we are seeing some customers with redirect lists that include 100M+ entries or more!
"Using the KV store… we hit the redirect immediately, and the user can go on to find the content they actually want. And because that content is also served from the edge, the whole round trip of a redirect and landing on the next page takes 50 milliseconds," said Keith Mazanec, Director of software engineering at Brad's Deals
Other use cases include storing customer preferences to deliver more personalized experiences, storing product catalog data and transaction histories for better inventory management, and storing data for recommendation engines and more targeted marketing campaigns at the edge.
What will you build?
Be among the first to try KV Store. For this first wave of service, we will walk you through getting it all set up for you.
Join our community
We encourage you to run your own benchmarks. Come to our forum and share your results. We want to hear your unsolicited feedback.
Want to hear more? Get in touch with us for a personalized demo.
