Canstar delivers microsecond response times and top security with low total cost of ownership

The challenge

Canstar is committed to providing the best customer experience delivering quick product comparisons powered by its large database which includes thousands of products from hundreds of brands.

With this in mind, the Canstar DevOps team needed to make its industry-leading websites faster and more secure. They sought to make a big impact, despite having a relatively small team. “One of our goals is to get load times down from milliseconds to microseconds,” says Mohit Sharma, lead DevOps engineer at Canstar. His team needed to find the right cloud computing vendor with industry-leading expertise in several areas to help implement his team’s vision.

Security is a critical factor for Canstar’s financial services comparison business. “As a trusted brand, we take security very seriously. We needed to find a cloud provider who could deliver DDoS protection, bot mitigation, and rate-limiting of website injection SQL attacks,” Sharma explains.

They also wanted to shorten the time from development to release, which would enable the techteams to make changes to improve site quality with confidence more rapidly. That meant Sharma’s team needed to find a CDN vendor with the capability to simulate real traffic and production-level caching in non-production environments.

In addition, the business wanted a quick migration and something that was easy for DevOps to use every day. Saving time would enable the company’s software engineers to focus more on innovation and less on infrastructure.

The best combination of security expertise, fast time to value (TTV), and low total cost of ownership (TCO) were criteria the team wanted to find in a cloud computing provider.

The solution

Fastly provided the full range of edge cloud platform solutions and the expertise Canstar required. Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF, CDN, and Compute products work together and reduce Canstar’s cloud costs and time investment, while providing the trustworthy security the company needs “We both lowered our costs and found that working with Fastly saved us time. With Fastly, integrations are seamless and easy, and we don’t have to engage third-party vendors,” Sharma says.

Canstar migrates right away, achieves faster time to value with Fastly Next-Gen WAF

Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF proved to be easier and quicker to implement than the previous WAF. According to Sharma,, “Fastly’s security experts were ready with solutions to the security problems we faced. And the WAF was so easy to implement, that in less than two weeks we started migration. Since our engineering team spent so little time learning and implementing the WAF, they got back to the business of innovation quicker. Choosing Fastly’s WAF implementation gave our engineering team the power to focus on our business.”

Sharma appreciates how the dashboards from Fastly make security reporting easy, too. “We can see all the different attacks needed for reporting. They are conveniently consolidated in one place,” he says.

Production and non-production workloads benefit from advanced CDN capabilities

Low costs for the CDN enable Canstar to use Fastly heavily for both production and non-production workloads, and the benefits go beyond cost. “The cost is way cheaper than any other vendor we found, which helps us,” Sharma says. “And Fastly offers a key capability: our internal development team can simulate production traffic and production-level caching in non-production environments.” This helps the DevOps team deliver well-tested new features faster.

Caching images and PDFs as well as static JavaScript and CSS naturally speeds up a website, but now Canstar’s website queries are cached on both sites, too. “In the blink of an eye, our customers get to see the results of their queries on our website tables,” he says.

From language choice to technical support, Canstar saves with a reduced learning curve

Sharma describes the relationship between a vendor and a customer as a two-way street that requires good communication. “Fastly support has been really helpful and responsive—truly fantastic! When we need help, somebody is available who can walk us through new steps,” Sharma says. Fastly also provides useful information through workshops and helpful documentation.

Fastly reduces the learning curve for Canstar engineers in other ways, too. Learning a new language takes time, and Sharma appreciates that Fastly offers a choice of popular programming languages, which helped Canstar migrate quickly to Fastly Compute. “If an engineer is comfortable with Python, they can use Python. Fastly Compute supports five or six programming languages, so our engineers can use whichever language is easiest and fastest for them. That’s great customer service.”

Key takeaway

Canstar’s ability to streamline its toolset by consolidating into the Fastly platform, using Fastly Next-Gen WAF, Fastly CDN, and Fastly Compute, enables them to do much more and at lower total cost of ownership than the DevOps team experienced with other cloud computing providers.

This integration provided enhanced observability within a single platform while also improving security, cost efficiency, and performance. Additionally, through the partnership, Canstar was able to implement recommended optimisations, including query enhancements, further strengthening its overall infrastructure.

“Partnering with Fastly in 2019 was a great decision for Canstar that continues to pay us back five years on. They have provided expertise to support our goal to empower Australian consumers to make better financial decisions - looking at innovative, secure and performant ways to deliver content to our customers.”

Canstar’s ability to streamline its toolset by consolidating its separate WAF solution into Fastly, which was already being used for CDN. This integration provided enhanced observability within a single platform while also improving security, cost efficiency, and performance. Additionally, through the partnership, Canstar was able to implement recommended optimisations, including query enhancements, further strengthening its overall infrastructure.