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ACLU: exponential engagement following the U.S. election
In the months following the recent U.S. election, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has seen a sustained and rapid outpouring of support, reflected in record levels of giving and engagement with aclu.org. Following the first executive orders, we’ve seen exponential spikes in traffic to their website and a swell of donations. Here are the recent traffic patterns we’ve observed.
Introducing the Fastly savings calculator
Our CDN can cache more content than traditional solutions (static as well as rapidly changing, “event-driven” content), offloading traffic that would otherwise go to origin, allowing our customers to save on infrastructure costs. But just how big are these savings? To help answer this question at a glance, we recently launched our savings calculator, which offers quick insight into the savings you can expect as a result of improved cache hit ratios.
Fastly's POPs in Minneapolis, Montreal, and Madrid
We’re pleased to announce an alliteration of new POPs to the Fastly network: Minneapolis, Montreal, and Madrid. We’ve deployed these POPs to expand our reach throughout the Central United States, Canada, and southwestern Europe.
Announcing Altitude NYC
Altitude NYC brings a group of smart people together to solve complex problems in cloud infrastructure, security, DevOps, and more. You’ll hear from industry leaders like The New York Times, Spotify, Vogue, and Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook, and leave with real-world implementations you can take back to your team.
Engagement disparity: the inauguration & Women’s March
There was an uptick in traffic to media sites during the 45th president’s inauguration, but it didn’t compare to the election. Engagement during the weekend of January 20, 2017 in many ways mirrored the crowds — the Women’s March in DC had three times more people than the inauguration, and we saw a corresponding disparity in sustained online engagement. While traffic was high at the beginning of inauguration, it quickly levelled off. On the contrary, engagement during the Women’s March remained high into Saturday evening.
Chrome's Alex Russell on service workers, PWAs, and mobile | Fastly
At Altitude 2016, Software Engineer Alex Russell discussed the latest projects the “performance obsessed” Google Chrome team had underway. In this recap, we’ll take a look at how you can provide reliable offline experiences, how to best reach your users, and avoid the dreaded “Uncanny Valley.”
2016: a year in review
Since the founding of Fastly in 2011, we’ve continued to grow along with our customers at a rapid pace — as of 2017, we’ve grown to nearly 10 Tbps of global network capacity. 2016 was an eventful year; here’s a look at where we’ve been and where we’re going in 2017.
The top 10 moments of engagement in 2016
2016 was an eventful and emotional year, filled with surprises, cultural losses, tragedies, and the occasional glimmer of hope. Although we looked at 2016 as a whole, we found that the most instant and dramatic spikes in engagement were elicited by moments of global emotion — here’s a look at what we saw.
Anatomy of an IoT Botnet Attack
Understand how malware attacks happen to IoT devices and what companies can do to protect their devices from attacks.
Network expansion update: Frankfurt
We’re pleased to announce the addition of a second Frankfurt POP to Fastly’s network. In addition to providing more capacity and redundancy to our CDN in Central and Eastern Europe, the Frankfurt POP gives us the opportunity to leverage new switching technology to drive more 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports in our network.
Scaling Fastly Network: Balancing Requests | Fastly
Our previous post detailed how Fastly started down the slippery slope of network software. By implementing a distributed routing system on commodity switches, we were able to maintain complete control over how we forward packets at a fraction of the cost imposed by conventional networking wisdom.
Real-time insights: ACLU + Giving Tuesday 2016
The Tuesday after Thanksgiving marks one of the biggest days of the year for donation sites, and giving numbers hit record highs this year. We’ve collaborated with the ACLU to share some hope-inspiring donation data.
HTTP/2 is now in General Availability
We’re pleased to announce that HTTP/2 is now in General Availability. Our implementation of the HTTP/2 protocol supports all of the standard protocol features, which will deliver a host of benefits to our customers.
Real-time insights: holiday traffic
Our CDN gives us a unique, real-time view of aggregated traffic patterns on the web. With the 2016 holiday shopping season upon us, we took a look at how shoppers have engaged with ecommerce sites — as expected, we saw a 207% increase in traffic as compared to normal at 11 AM ET on Black Friday. But, traffic spikes weren’t isolated to our ecommerce customers. We also saw increased engagement with charity donation sites as well as food-related sites.
Redesigning the Fastly control panel
In July, we introduced the redesigned Fastly control panel, which our customers rely on to manage and control their Fastly services. As UX designers, we help make using the control panel the best experience possible by fostering a culture of user empathy and design collaboration throughout our entire organization. In this post, we’ll discuss design at Fastly, illustrating with examples from the redesign of our new control panel.
Secure comms & Fastly advisories reminder | Fastly
We publish our security advisories to address vulnerabilities discovered on our own platform, as well as significant security vulnerabilities that affect the wider internet community.
The 5 emotional stages of a DDoS attack
It’s emotionally damaging to be the victim of a DDoS, to say the least. The technological consequences of an unmitigated DDoS attack can cripple businesses, but the emotional impacts are often ignored. CEO Artur Bergman discusses the five emotional stages of a DDoS attack (and how to mitigate).
Solving VCL auth & feature flags at the edge | Fastly
In “How to solve anything” parts 1 and 2, we outlined how to use Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) to address some of your more challenging problems. In this post, we’ll discuss how Andrew Betts of the Financial Times uses advanced VCL to securely cache and serve authenticated and authorized content, and set up feature flags.
Election day 2016
Although online engagement increases with every election, the 2016 presidential election saw an especially dramatic boost. As surprising polling results rolled in across the nation, voters and global observers turned to trusted media sites to follow the politically polarizing race — here are some of the traffic patterns we observed.
A step towards better Web API authentication
The Fastly API is an integral part of our CDN — using our APIs, customers are able to instantly reflect configuration changes, purge content, and perform anything that is available on the Fastly control panel from within their application. In this post, Toru discusses our new API authentication method, API tokens.
