Interview: Nathan Huey – StackPath, Chief Marketing Officer

StackPath provides a platform of computing infrastructure and services built at the edge of the cloud. The company built a secure edge platform for the developers to create next-generation services. With the StackPath platform, developers can bring their big ideas to reality. We’ve talked with Nathan Huey, CMO of StackPath about the company history, the products and services of StackPath, and the impacts of COVID-19 on the industry.

Can you please tell us about StackPath’s history?

StackPath was founded by a number of Internet and cloud industry veterans from companies including SoftLayer, IBM Cloud, and CenturyLink, with a vision to drive the next wave of evolution of the cloud.

When we came out of “stealth” in July 2016 we had made four acquisitions -a content delivery network (CDN), a DDoS protection platform, a web application firewall (WAF), and a virtual private network (VPN) solution- for a combined 50,000 customers and $16 million in revenue. In 2017, we acquired a second CDN, Highwinds, creating a massive combined global footprint and further expanding our total customer base, and in 2018 acquired Server Density, a leading Internet service monitoring provider.

We have merged these technologies and footprints into a single, highly scalable, secure edge computing platform, providing edge compute and edge delivery services at the Internet’s front door.

What are the most popular StackPath products at the moment?

Since launching a little more than a year ago, our Edge Compute products which include Containers, Virtual Machines (VMs), and Serverless Scripting, have captured a great deal of interest. StackPath customers can deploy and manage their applications and services closer to their end-users than ever. This is accomplished by leveraging our points of presence (PoPs) that are strategically located in highly populous locations around the world – physically much closer than centralized public cloud. The higher proximity means fewer hops, which makes StackPath Edge Compute ideal for workloads that require near-immediate response times, ranging from gaming to media delivery, IoT, ad tech, and more.

At StackPath, we believe the edge is not a replacement of cloud, but an evolution. With 5G on the rise and IoT growing massively, leveraging the power of the edge is crucial for practically any internet-centric business. A company doesn’t necessarily need to move all of its workloads to the edge, but part of almost any application can be run at the edge to reduce overall traffic costs, increase visibility and control, and improve end-user experiences.

How did the COVID situation affect Stackpath?

Not to make light out of COVID-19, but with most people now stuck at home all day and using the Internet day and night to stream content, conduct meetings, and play games, we have seen a notable increase in traffic. While some infrastructure providers are struggling to meet demands, our global network is designed to effortlessly scale and is doing amazingly well handling the higher traffic.

Are you planning to expand your edge locations network in the near future? If so, which region are you planning to invest in first?

We don’t have anything specific to announce at this time. However, we are always looking to expand our current 65+Tbps total network capacity, add to our edge locations around the world, and explore opportunities with our strategic partners.

Can you please tell us how serverless scripting works exactly?

StackPath Serverless Scripting allows our customers to upload or write scripts to our platform and have them deployed within seconds to every StackPath edge location around the world, where they run on demand.

Serverless scripts are executed in the StackPath edge location closest to a given end-user. When a user’s request comes in, we execute the JavaScript code in an individual, isolated sandbox environment built on StackPath’s custom implementation of the V8 JavaScript Engine. Because V8 is open-source and widely used, it is already highly secure but we have added even more security mechanisms to keep the code secure and completely separate from anyone else’s. Using V8 also allows the code to start extremely quickly, whether it’s being run for the first time or the thousandth.

When a user request comes into a StackPath data center and the code is executed in the V8 engine, it is executing before StackPath’s CDN cache or WAF services. This ordering means the customer has complete control over incoming traffic and can manipulate or block requests before StackPath responds or they get to the origin server.

How much can a company reduce its cost after switching to StackPath? 

It depends on the company and for what they need to use our platform. We have a wide range of services that provide a lot of advantages for a lot of different use cases or industries -from website acceleration and delivery to online video, online gaming, IoT management, and more. But our company is borne out of the cloud industry, and follows cloud models, so we’re transparent about our pricing and have solutions engineers ready to help enterprises identify the best way to use and how much they might benefit from our platform.