Ekstra Bladet Ensures Stability, High Performance and Instant updates with Fastly

The Challenge

“My role on Ekstra Bladet is basically to ensure happy users,” said Allan Juul, Director of Development at Danish news site Ekstra Bladet. What makes users unhappy? Going online for news during major events and finding a site offline. After Ekstra Bladet experienced significant downtime during multiple traffic spikes, Juul and his team began the search for a scalable and globally accessible solution to handle surges in traffic without disruptions.

The Solution

Ekstra Bladet implemented Fastly as a cache solution, complementing their existing setup. “We are quite happy with Fastly,” said Juul, listing three primary reasons Fastly is their solution of choice.

Fastly's global network provides fast and reliable content delivery worldwide. Although Ekstra Bladet is a Danish newspaper, it serves content all over the world. Fastly’s strategically distributed network ensures a brilliant user experience no matter where readers are located. A major benefit of using Fastly from a news site perspective is the feature of lightning fast purging of content that needs instant updates.

The intuitive Fastly Control Panel makes Fastly’s CDN features easier to use and provides the observability necessary to keep things running smoothly. “We really like the ease of Fastly tooling and the management console,” Juul said.

Fastly was built by developers for developers.“Fastly is very developer friendly, which is good for our developers and the Platform team,” Juul said. Fastly’s developer-friendly tools streamline the adoption process, ensuring a seamless transition.

Ekstra Bladet’s initial deployment of Fastly’s CDN focused on just caching static content like images to enhance website performance. Since then, the ease of integration and robustness of the platform encouraged Ekstra Bladet to extend how they use the solution. “Basically, our whole website is behind Fastly now,” said Juul. The company is also exploring opportunities to leverage Fastly for cloud-based microservices.

Key takeaway

Fastly empowers Ekstra Bladet to proactively handle major incidents, ensuring a scalable global solution that is able to handle surges in traffic without disruptions. As a result, Juul and his team can continue to cultivate satisfied users and deliver uninterrupted news content. The success the company has had with Fastly so far has inspired Ekstra Bladet to expand the strategic role Fastly plays in its evolving digital infrastructure.