Fastly's 35th POP: Johannesburg + Network Upgrades
VP, Infrastructure
As Fastly grows, we continue to deploy our points of presence (POPs) in strategic locations around the globe to best accommodate our customers’ traffic needs and their users’ expectations. We’re pleased to announce our 35th POP located in Johannesburg, South Africa, as well as a 738% increase in overall network capacity since 2014.
We’ve deployed to Johannesburg (JNB, named for the nearby airport code) to further reduce latency and increase performance for sites delivered by Fastly throughout southern Africa. With JNB online, Fastly now has POPs on six continents. In this post, I’ll discuss the improvements users in South Africa and neighboring areas will see, as well as the latest updates to our network in Auckland, Miami, Seattle, and Singapore.
South Africa is home to nearly 53 million people, and the World Bank estimates that nearly 50% of the population of South Africa is online. Users in this region were historically served from Fastly POPs in London and Frankfurt; round trip latency from South Africa to Europe via submarine cable systems is ~120ms at best. With our new JNB POP, latency has dropped over 200ms for folks in South Africa, according to our Real User Measurement (RUM) data.
Source: Cedexis
Users in surrounding countries in southern, eastern, and central Africa are also being routed to the JNB POP when Fastly’s routing systems determine JNB provides topological benefit to users. Here’s an example of the performance improvement to neighboring Botswana:
Source: Cedexis
In addition to acquiring a robust blend of IP transit connectivity, Fastly has joined the NAPAfrica IXP in Johannesburg, which enables us to interconnect with various regional networks, ISPs, and mobile operators directly and locally. By interconnecting with Fastly locally, operators can save valuable capacity on submarine links up to Europe and the Middle East, with customers receiving the ultimate benefit of improved access to various sites and applications.
Other updates: upgrades!
We’ve been busy scaling and upgrading the Fastly network across Auckland, Miami, Seattle, and Singapore. We completely rebuilt our POP in Auckland by deploying into a carrier-neutral data center, acquiring a robust transit blend, and connecting to the AKL-IX and Megaport AKL peering exchanges. Establishing a presence at these exchanges helps Fastly find the fastest and most performant routes between networks. The graph below shows the benefit to users in New Zealand:
Source: Cedexis
In Miami, we doubled our cache server capacity and have also connected to the Florida Internet Exchange (FLIX). We quadrupled server capacity and installed 100GE capable network gear in Seattle and Singapore to massively bolster the size of and capabilities of those POPs, too. As always, you can subscribe to updates on our status page to stay informed as we continue scaling to support our rapidly growing global customer base.
