Introducing WebSocket Support for all Fastly customers!

Today, Fastly announces support for WebSockets on Delivery and Compute services in General Availability! This has been a long requested feature and we are pleased to bring this support to the world's fastest edge network. Dansons participated in the Fastly WebSockets beta program, and saw that these requests were "5-7x faster than regular HTTP."

Technical Overview 

WebSockets are two-way communication channels between a client device (such as a web browser) and a server, allowing the server to send messages to the client at any time without the client having to make a request. With WebSockets support on Fastly, customers can use their origins with WebSockets implemented on the same domain used for content delivery. 

Unlike the HTTP requests which make up the bulk of web traffic handled by Fastly, WebSockets are long-lived connections and do not have a request-response cycle. Instead, WebSockets can carry data in either direction at any time. As a result, WebSockets don't fit Fastly's normal processing model for edge traffic, but  any connection that begins life as an HTTP connection can be upgraded to a WebSocket connection.

Compute or Delivery (depending on which environment you are using) is used as a way to opt-in to websockets and do backend selection. You control which connections are upgraded, and you can choose a backend on the fly using WASM  or VCL. Read more about getting started with WebSockets on our award nominated Developer Hub! 

How to get started with Websockets 

Ready to get started with WebSockets? Contact your Fastly Sales Representative or hit the “Contact Me” button under WebSockets in your Service configs for a Sales Representative to reach out to you! 

WebSockets pricing is based on bandwidth and connection time, where your WebSockets bandwidth utilization is included in your Fastly service's total delivery bandwidth. Connection time is calculated as the total number of minutes that your connections are open during the billing cycle. Subscription tiers are based on connection time, including a free tier with up to 1 million minutes of connection time.