Getting started with Fastly CDN is easier than ever with Glitch

We’re making it easier than ever to learn how to deliver your website traffic using Fastly. In the two years since Glitch became part of Fastly, we’ve discovered how valuable it is to be able to give learners a website they can remix at the click of a button and use with a Fastly service. We’re excited to share our first developer guide that comes with a companion Glitch project our community members can use to onboard with Fastly quickly and easily.

Any tech product is just one piece of a puzzle

The nature of the web today is integration. Sites and applications exist within a complex ecosystem of dependencies that developers need to understand to get good value from any particular product. Many developer products across the industry use Glitch to support adoption and onboarding through low friction, remixable apps that come with help information included right inside the project. At Fastly, being able to teach our tech in the context of a website is crucial when it comes to conveying the purpose and value of what we build. 

This is why we’re embarking on a program of learning experiences that leverage Glitch to help users understand technologies like CDNs and edge computing – starting with one on Website Delivery. 

Our new guide walks through the flow of creating a website on Glitch and setting up a Fastly CDN service to deliver it to your site visitors, outlining how to use free Fastly TLS to point your domain at your site along the way. The goal is to help you get value from Fastly as quickly and easily as possible, making your websites faster and more reliable in just a few short steps.

Enabling our internal community

We’ve taken a slightly unusual approach to creating this learning experience by using it for employee training. In the first part of 2024, we used Glitch to teach teams inside the company how to get started working with Fastly services. Glitch helped our coworkers develop their understanding of how Fastly fits into the picture on the web and in the wider world. Basing the training on a Glitch project helped us get people hands-on with Fastly, reaching a valuable learning outcome in a single session, regardless of their role or background.

This training program acted as user testing on the learning experience, so it served a dual purpose of enabling employees with product knowledge and helping us to make these resources as effective as possible for our users. We also opened a rich channel of internal product feedback, resulting in many UX enhancements we were able to action quickly, making the product easier for all who try it going forward.

Supporting a diverse cohort of learners

People prefer to learn in different ways – some like to work through comprehensive material upfront and scaffold their knowledge methodically, while others prefer to learn through experimentation and play. By providing an interactive Glitch project that mirrors the learning pathway in its companion tutorial, we’re supporting a wider range of learners than we were able to before.

You can check out our new tutorial now: Delivering your site through Fastly

You’ll find the Glitch project embedded in the page and can remix it for a guided experience inside the Glitch editor.

If you get stuck or would like to share feedback, please post in the community forum!