Tyler McMullen
CTO, Fastly
Tyler McMullen is CTO at Fastly, where he’s responsible for the system architecture and leads the company’s technology vision. As part of the founding team, Tyler built the first versions of Fastly’s Instant Purging system, API, and Real-time Analytics. A self-described technology curmudgeon, he has experience in everything from web design to kernel development, and loathes all of it. Especially distributed systems.
WASI 0.2: Unlocking WebAssembly’s Promise Outside the Browser
The WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) Subgroup recently reached a significant milestone by voting to launch WASI 0.2, also known as WASI Preview 2.
Compute@Edge with CLI, Terraform API & Language Support | Fastly
Now running production traffic, Compute takes a leap forward in delivering on the promise of highly performant, secure, and globally distributed serverless computing with the introduction of powerful new functionality and tooling.
Internet changed in 2019, expect more in 2020 | Fastly
Take a look back at 2019’s major shifts in internet infrastructure, and understand what they mean for the future of the internet in 2020 and beyond.
Fastly and Partners Form Bytecode Alliance
Fastly teams up with Mozilla, Intel, and Red Hat to form the Bytecode Alliance, an open-source community working together on WebAssembly-based compiler tools and foundations that work across many platforms.
Beta" A New Serverless Compute Environment
Fastly is now offering access to its serverless compute environment in private beta. Meet Compute@Edge, a uniquely secure, performant, and scalable approach to serverless computing.
How Terrarium reframes the compiler and sandbox relationship
Get hands-on with Terrarium, a Fastly project that lets developers harness the power of edge computing in the languages they already use. See how this technology demonstration came to be (and why we're even using that term), what problems it solves, and where it's headed.
How edge innovation sparked Fastly Labs
We’re thrilled to introduce Fastly Labs, a hub of in-progress projects and big ideas for the developer community to interact with, all built upon our philosophy of trust, transparency, and Fastly’s long history of edge innovation.
How natural disasters meet unprecedented engagement
As part of our mission to serve the best of the internet, we’re honored to offer complimentary CDN services to nonprofits, including One America Appeal, Direct Relief, Reporters Without Borders, Khan Academy, and more. Although the fall of 2017 had more than its fair share of natural disasters, we were heartened to learn how people gave (and engaged) with nonprofits. Read on to see what we learned.
2017 holiday insights: biggest Cyber Monday yet
Cyber Monday 2017 was the biggest yet, bringing in $6.59 billion in online sales — compared to $5.03 billion on Black Friday, and 16.8% more revenue than Cyber Monday last year. And, this Cyber Monday was the first $2 billion mobile shopping day. Similar to our observations last year, we saw significant increases in traffic to ecommerce sites during the week of Thanksgiving, with traffic climbing to 152% above average in the morning of Cyber Monday. Read on to see what we learned.
The Gaga Dive, and other Super Bowl phenomenon
The Super Bowl is one of the most-watched events in U.S. television, and presents a unique opportunity for companies to reach prospective customers through clever and well-placed advertising. This year, brands with ads drove an average increase in engagement of 437%, but that wasn’t the only engagement we observed — like last year’s big game, people signed off to watch the kickoff and halftime shows, and music streaming services also saw an increase in engagement as fans rushed to identify songs in commercials.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Major moments from the third and final presidential debate
This election has garnered an unprecedented amount of attention, and while traffic to media sites increased during the third debate, major moments of engagement (spikes) decreased by 83% as compared to the first debate. Here are some of the traffic patterns we saw.
How the internet reacted to the first presidential debate
As a CDN, we’re in a unique position to view traffic patterns: we’re able to get a closer look into traffic trends and spikes as they occur. This year’s presidential debate drew a record number of viewers — here are some of the traffic patterns we observed.
The future of the edge
In this post, Tyler McMullen will explore “the future of the edge,” or the next logical step in how we streamline online experiences. In order to keep up with the direction things are headed, we need to combine logic and data at the edge. Logic without data, without state, is insufficient.
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.
Surrogate Keys: Part 1
Here at Fastly HQ, we want websites to be fast. Caching is commonly used to speed up websites. However, caching rapidly changing and unpredictably updated content can be difficult. To make it easier, we built surrogate keys: a system that makes it possible to quickly purge related content.
