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Easier edge building with Fastly and Glitch | Fastly

Simon Wistow

VP Strategic Initiatives, Fastly

Compute@Edge, our serverless compute platform, empowers developers to build applications at the edge with more flexibility in the languages they already use every day. We’re expanding our commitment to help you build the way you want with a new partnership with Glitch, a tooling platform and community that shares our vision of a world where all digital experiences are fast, engaging, and safe for everyone.

Now it’s even easier to create high-quality, customized digital experiences on our edge cloud platform through an integration that lets you deploy Glitch apps to Compute@Edge. 

Creating a more open and reliable web 

Over the past 10 years, customers have built things on our platform that have blown our minds: queuing systems for ticket sales, migration tools for multicloud architectures, paywall systems, OAuth endpoints, and the list goes on. They’ve built Mandelbrot generators and static site hosting systems, video analytics platforms and beacon trackers that receive millions of requests a day. All of this was built using Varnish Configuration Language (VCL), a domain-specific language designed to make it easier to inspect and manipulate HTTP requests and responses. 

But we wanted our customers to have even more flexibility, as well as access to familiar languages like Rust and JavaScript. That led to the creation of Compute@Edge, built on top of WebAssembly to mitigate the risks of introducing arbitrary languages with a more performant and secure place to deliver your websites and applications.

Of course, all this power and flexibility can also introduce complexity, and a learning curve. We want our platform to be as easy to use for as many different groups of people as possible. And so, for that reason, we partnered with Glitch.

We want our platform to be as easy to use for as many different groups of people as possible. And so, for that reason, we partnered with Glitch.

How it works

Glitch’s web-based IDE and deployment system allows you to get your app up and running as quickly and easily as possible without having to configure and admin a server, manage DNS, install a database, or figure out the best way to deploy your code. You just press a button and *poof* your app is running.

Glitch also lets developers remix apps from their community — you like that thing over there but wish it was just a little different? Just remix it, deploy it, and be on your way. This remix culture leads to a real democratization of the web because everyone can get started and create their own app with almost no friction. But more importantly, it fosters a supportive community of developers who can collaborate to build amazing things.

A more collaborative future

This partnership further expands our joint mission of lowering the barriers to entry to more performant, secure, and scalable web experiences for all. Both our customers and the larger developer community get all the ease and approachability of Glitch with all the power and scalability of our edge cloud platform: the 167+ Tbps of network capacity, the DDoS and next-gen WAF protection, the global datacenter distribution, the low latency, and start up times 100x faster than anything else on the market. 

This is what we hope the future of the web looks like: organizations coming together to combine their strengths and open up the web to more people. We’re excited to be at the forefront of that with Glitch.

To learn more or to sign up for the beta program, head over to Glitch's site for more details.