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The benefits of using Varnish
Varnish is an open source web accelerator that is designed for high-performance content delivery. Learn more about what Varnish is and how Fastly's varnish can help accelerate your content.
Introducing Soft Purge
Today, we’re excited to announce Soft Purge, a new purging feature that allows you to easily mark content as outdated (stale) instead of permanently deleting it from Fastly’s caches. With Soft Purge, you have the same real-time purging options that you get with Instant Purge: purge by URL or by surrogate key.
March 19 OpenSSL Security Advisory
Fastly has evaluated each of these vulnerabilities and found that only one moderate-severity bug affects our configuration. We are currently testing the patch and coordinating a global release of the updated software across Fastly’s network. We anticipate no customer impact or configuration changes.
Cache hit issues? Fix it | Fastly.
The cache hit ratio (or hit ratio for short) is the ratio of hits to cacheable requests (hits and misses combined). There's also cache coverage, the ratio of cacheable requests to all requests (cacheable requests and passes). In most cases, you'll want both to be as high as possible, since misses and passes cause load on your origins, and are slower than cache hits.
10 questions to ask when evaluating CDNs
In my last blog post, I discussed why you should use a content delivery network. But after you’ve decided to start using a CDN, you’ll need to pick out the right CDN for your business.
TLS at the edge and server-side security
We’re huge fans of Transport Layer Security (TLS) at Fastly. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we do encryption at the edge, which can also serve as overall best practices for handling server-side TLS.
Fastly support training & lessons learned | Fastly
This article dives into our support team's training processes and explains how our lessons learned can help your support team grow.
What Is a CDN and Why You Should Use One
A content delivery network (CDN) is a way to deliver content from your website or mobile application to people more quickly and efficiently, based on their geographic location.
How our solid-state drives result in cost savings for customers
Solid-State Drives (SSDs) are semiconductor-based storage devices that save persistent data by using NAND flash memory. See how Fastly manages caches with SSDs and how you can save.
Fastly's support building, part 3 | Fastly
At Fastly, we've made some key decisions about how to operate and structure our support team in a way that allows us to deliver quality at scale. Some of the lessons we learned are more specific to issues encountered as we grew, but most can be applied to any support or customer-facing team.
Getting an A in security: SHA-2 migration and disabling RC4
As many of you know, TLS best practices have changed a lot in the past two years. Recently, Fastly has changed how we configure TLS to make it even more secure. This includes migrating our TLS certificates from SHA-1 to SHA-2 and disabling RC4 for all our services.
Boost Cache Efficiency with Origin Log Analysis
If you want to increase the efficiency of your Varnish (or Fastly) cache, you need to figure out what traffic is not cached. By definition, any traffic that reaches your origin is not cached, and thus worthy of investigation.
How Fastly builds support, part 2: The customer experience
What customers encounter when evaluating and onboarding with Fastly isn't arbitrary. It's an experience that we've intentionally crafted. This post will discuss what customers experience, and what we have in place to make sure it happens every time, for every customer.
Securing the news: TLS for media sites
TLS is especially applicable to news sites. News organizations bear a public responsibility to accurately report the news, and need to take the steps necessary to ensure credibility. The security of online news content is one of the first steps in verifying its veracity while protecting readers.
How Fastly Builds Support, Part 1: Our Standards
In the time I've been at Fastly, we've had enough customers and friends ask us about how we do support and what's going on under the hood that it seems appropriate to give a high level overview of how we build, what we've learned, and how other teams can borrow from our setup.
Deep Log Visibility Offered by Logentries | Fastly
Today Logentries released a Fastly Community Pack, which automatically sets up tags, saved queries, and visualizations in the Logentries dashboard to help Fastly customers get the most out of their real-time logs.
Accelerating Rails, Part 2: Dynamic HTTP Caching
In the second part of our series on accelerating Rails, I'll cover configuration of a few Fastly features, Varnish and Varnish Configuration Language (VCL), and strategies for caching dynamic content that are targeted towards the Rails developer.
Normalizing the Host Header
In the continued quest to increase cache hit ratios, the chant is: "Normalize, normalize, normalize." Less variation in your requests means you have a higher chance of getting hits. This month's highlight is the Host header.
Fastly updates terms, privacy, and use policies | Fastly
Security, compliance and transparency are very important to us at Fastly, and these updates will help protect our customers as well as our company.
Caching the Uncacheable: CSRF Security
In this post, I investigate several strategies for maintaining security while improving cacheability. I use Ruby on Rails for the examples, but the techniques apply to nearly any web application framework.
