All blog posts

Steve Souders on High Performance Web Components

Kelly Jandro

At April's WebPerf meetup in San Francisco, Fastly Chief Performance Officer Steve Souders discussed the synchronous and asynchronous nature of Web Components, and how they can impact the rendering of the entire page.

Jason Cook's "Stupid Boot Tricks"

Kelly Jandro

Fastly principal engineer Jason Cook explains how he uses iPXE and Chef to get to boot management bliss. Check out his slides from ChefConf 2014 here.

Ruby on Rails on Fastly

Ryan Richards

Fastly is a developer-minded CDN, so we're always looking for ways to integrate with the most popular frameworks and platforms. Today, we're happy to announce a number of improvements aimed at the Ruby on Rails community.

Jason Cook at ChefConf 2014

Kelly Jandro

Today, Fastly principal engineer Jason Cook will be speaking at ChefConf 2014 in San Francisco. His talk will focus on building a boot system using Chef's API and iPXE to create a lightweight tool for managing install and firmware updating of hosts and network gear.

Fastly Update on 'Heartbleed'

Christopher Brown

Here’s the latest update on the ongoing resolution to critical OpenSSL vulnerability CVE-2014-0160, aka 'Heartbleed,' which was announced on April 7th and affects nearly every Internet service provider and website using SSL to secure customer traffic.

Fastly at PyCon 2014

Kelly Jandro

This week, we’re traveling to Montreal for PyCon 2014. If you’ll be there, make sure to stop by booth #611 in the Exhibit Hall to chat with a Fastly engineer, explore our real-time analytics dashboard, and pick up a Fastly shirt.

Steve Souders at Fluent 2014

Kelly Jandro

We were thrilled to be a part of Fluent Conf 2014. Big thanks to everyone who stopped by the Fastly booth to chat with our engineers and pick up a Fastly shirt.

If you missed Fastly CPO Steve Souders' Fluent talk about the Perception of Speed, you can watch it below.

Fastly at Fluent 2014

Kelly Jandro

The Fastly team is attending Fluent this week in San Francisco. We’ll be at booth #206 right next to our friends from New Relic. Come by to talk with one of our engineers, grab a Fastly shirt, and learn how to win our DevOps survival kit.

Fastly Welcomes New Executive Team Hires

Artur Bergman

Today, we’re excited to welcome three new Fastly team members.

API Caching, Part III

Ryan Richards

In this, our final API Caching installment, we're going to explore how to use Surrogate Keys to reduce the overall complexity of caching an API.

Building a Fast and Reliable Purging System

Bruce Spang

At Fastly, we’re always working to make our systems faster and more reliable. One of the more difficult problems we’ve faced is efficient cache invalidation across our global network, or as we call it: Instant Purging. When content changes, our customers issue a purge request, which we then need to deliver to each of our cache servers. The system that handles these purge requests is codenamed Powderhorn.

How Fastly Chooses POP Locations

Chris Hendrie

Build a network that can scale indefinitely, be managed by a small crew of skilled ops and network engineers, and handle current web traffic and the next generation of protocols. Sounds impossible, right?

Not true.

When planning a major content delivery network, you’d think that it would make sense to put your equipment where the most people are, right?

Not always.

API Caching, Part II

Ryan Richards

In Part 1, we covered the basics of using Fastly to accelerate a comments API. Using Instant Purge, we hooked into model callbacks to ensure that the appropriate content was purged from the cache whenever data changed. In this article, we’ll build upon the original approach and use one of Fastly’s more advanced features: cache control.

New Fastly Logging Features

Simon Wistow

Over the last few months, we’ve completely overhauled Fastly’s entire logging infrastructure to keep up with our ever-increasing traffic. In addition to improving efficiency and reliability, we added features to make it easier for our customers to integrate with the logging providers they already use.

Jason Cook at Linux Conference Australia 2014

Kelly Jandro

Last week, Fastly engineer Jason Cook spoke about TCP tuning at the 2014 Linux Conference in Australia. His session covers tuning several aspects of your application and the underlying TCP stack to deliver the best possible performance over the public Internet. If you missed it, check out the video below.

Introducing Version Diff

Simon Wistow

Since day one, we’ve baked the concept of versions right into our system at a fundamental level. We want customers to feel empowered to try new things and to be able to quickly roll them back or create a new version if changes are needed. We’ve brought DevOps best practices to our CDN.

5 Ways to Optimize for Holiday Traffic

Simon Wistow

During the holiday season, which normally accounts for 20-40% of total sales annually, it's critical for e-retailers to provide their users with a smooth, responsive shopping experience. Recent research has shown that 40% of online shoppers will move to a competitor’s site if yours doesn't load in 3 seconds or less. In fact, about $3 billion in revenue is lost annually due to customers abandoning shopping carts on slow web sites. With that in mind, here are Fastly’s top 5 tips for optimizing and speeding up your site for the holidays.

API Caching, Part I

Ryan Richards

The web has come a long way since the 90s. In the past, sites were commonly driven by a single, monolithic application that acted as the only communication medium to a centralized database. The modern approach is to break this one large application into a set of interdependent and cooperative services.

Reduce Page Load Times

Chuck Tipton

Ensuring a smooth end user experience with short page load times - whether for shopping online, reading the news, or collaborating on software - is one of the main reasons Fastly customers use our Content Delivery Network. Viewers' expectations for page load times have become increasingly demanding.

Fastly at the Varnish User Group Meeting (VUG8)

Kacie Hendrickson

Fastly Caching Software is built on Varnish Cache, an open source HTTP accelerator. We are big believers in open source - we provide free services for Ruby Gems, PyPI, Perl and Debian among others, and we’re regular contributors to Varnish, Chef, Perl and Ganglia. Fastly fully supports VCL (Varnish Configuration Language), allowing customers to both download Fastly-generated VCL and upload custom VCL to mix and match with the Fastly configuration. VCL offers our customers unmatched control over request routing and on-the fly request and response modification.