Anna MacLachlan
Content Marketing Manager, Fastly
Anna MacLachlan is Fastly’s Content Marketing Manager, where she talks to brands and partners to tell stories about scale, security, and performance. She received her MA in Comparative Literature from NYU and loves megafauna and mountains.
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Spotify on diagnosing cascading errors
Our customers’ war stories have taught us that even the most routine changes (like restarting a database or switching backends) can sometimes lead to unexpected errors, but savvy teams already have the tools and processes in place to resolve them as they happen. In this post, we’ll share how Niklas Gustavsson, Principal Engineer at Spotify, encountered live (in production, and accessible to end users) but unplayable content after what should have been a routine change, as well as lessons learned and Niklas’ favorite debugging tool.
Reddit on building & scaling r/place
Altitude SF 2017 brought together technical leaders from Reddit, the ACLU, TED, Slack, and more to explore the future of edge delivery, emerging web trends, and the challenges of cloud infrastructure and security. In this post, we’ll share Daniel Ellis’ talk on how Reddit built and scaled r/place, their real-time April Fools’ project.
Failing fast & fixing faster at Vogue
A tale of failure and recovery from Kenton Jacobsen, Director of Engineering at Vogue.com and Glamour.com.
Technical trainings & the future of edge delivery at Altitude
Altitude SF 2017 featured hands-on trainings and talks from industry leaders like Reddit, the ACLU, Slack, TED, and more. We explored the future of edge delivery, heard about emerging trends in cloud infrastructure and DevOps, and tackled complex problems in cloud security. Read on for our recap of the event (plus slides, videos, and photos).
HashiCorp on recovering from failures
Altitude NYC featured war stories from Fastly customers like Vogue, Spotify, and HashiCorp. Read on for our recap of Seth Vargo’s talk, where he discussed how HashiCorp was able to quickly recover from an outage (which included an alarming “purge all” moment).
New York Media on surviving DDoS and building a better web
At Altitude 2016, New York Media’s CTO discussed surviving a massive DDoS and the steps they took to mitigate, gave us a peek inside their stack, and described how New York Media is building a better web, working towards creating a symbiotic relationship between readers, publishers, and advertisers to ensure great experiences for everyone.
The New York Times on Prepping for the 2016 Election
At Altitude NYC, *The New York Times* CTO Nick Rockwell gave us a peek inside *The New York Times*’ stack and culture (and how he’s redefined risk from both a corporate and engineering standpoint), and described how they prepare for major events — such as the 2016 presidential election.
Altitude NYC 2017 in review: videos and slides
Altitude NYC brought together Fastly engineers and industry leaders like The New York Times and Nordstromrack.com | Hautelook to discuss complex problems in security, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and more. Check out our recap and watch the session videos to learn about the vision behind Fastly, take a look under the hood of a DDoS attack, see what went down on election night at the NYT, and more.
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.”
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.
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.
The evolution of election technology
With more and more ways for candidates to engage with voters online, campaigns face a unique set of technical challenges, many of which weren’t present during the last presidential election. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the technical challenges candidates’ engineering teams face in 2016, as well as some of the strategies we’ve seen.
VCL problem-solving: SOA routing & non-ASCII support | Fastly
In “How to solve anything, part 1,” we discussed Andrew Betts’ clever tips for using Fastly’s Custom Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) to collect data at the edge. In this post, we’ll look at how Nikkei uses VCL to deal with a service-oriented architecture as well as write synthetic responses with non-ASCII characters.
The elements of scaling
Camille Fournier, former CTO of Rent the Runway and self-described senior thinker and raconteur, spoke at Altitude 2016 on her experience in leadership, sharing how she overcame the communication barrier that comes with growth to scale successful, happy teams.
VCL problem solving: collect edge data | Fastly
At our second annual customer summit, Andrew Betts of the Financial Times discussed using VCL to “solve anything” — pushing his team’s problems to the CDN layer.
Don’t let your successes bring you(r site) down
Often the main goal for marketing and advertising campaigns is to point visitors to your website, and it’s important you’re prepared for the success you’ll (hopefully) see. Hear how Fastly customer Dollar Shave Club launched a successful ad while maintaining site uptime and performance throughout, as well as best practices for making sure your major successes don’t bring you down.
Altitude 2016: the future of the edge
Last week we gathered a group of innovative industry leaders from around the world for our second annual customer summit in San Francisco. This year’s Altitude focused on the future of the edge, and we heard from a brilliant group of speakers.
The fallacy of fast: Ines Sombra at Altitude 2015
We hosted our first-ever customer summit in June of last year, with the goal of bringing together our customers and the people who build our products to discuss web performance, Varnish, and the future of Fastly. Systems Engineer Ines Sombra’s Altitude 2015 talk, “The fallacy of fast,” reflects on the shortcuts we tend to take when we iterate quickly.
The Beyoncé Drop (and other Super Bowl phenomena)
Last Sunday over 111.9 million viewers tuned in for the Super Bowl. As a CDN, we’re in a unique position — we help companies handle the impact of successful Super Bowl ads, and monitor the results in real time. We thought it might be interesting to share some of the traffic patterns we noticed during the big game.
How to use Fastly + Logentries for insight into log data
Read our Q&A with Logentries’ Director of Product Marketing, Matt Kiernan, and learn how to use Fastly + Logentries for immediate insight into log data.
