Performance
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How Fastly Chooses POP Locations
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
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.
API Caching, Part I
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.
Fastly CDN Expands
At Fastly, we’re constantly working to upgrade our network and expand global capacity. Last week, we built up capacity in our Ashburn, New York City, and Los Angeles POPs and brought a new Miami POP online to improve user experience in South and Central America. We also brought a second London POP online and increased the capacity in our existing London and Frankfurt POPs. In addition to our existing POPs in Tokyo and New Zealand, we’ve added new POPs in Singapore and Hong Kong to bring our customers’ content even closer to users in Asia Pacific. These upgrades are already available to current customers.
Surrogate Keys: Part 2
One of my favorite computer science jokes is that there are only two truly difficult problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. At Fastly, we deal with these sorts of difficult problems every day. In our previous post on surrogate keys, we discussed how this feature can help you solve the problem of invalidating dynamic content. In this post, we’ll take a look under the hood at how we efficiently represented this system.
Surrogate Keys: Part 1
Here at Fastly HQ, we want websites to be fast. Caching is commonly used to speed up websites. However, caching rapidly changing and unpredictably updated content can be difficult. To make it easier, we built surrogate keys: a system that makes it possible to quickly purge related content.
