QuantCDN boosts TTFB for dynamic content delivery by 250% with an API-first platform powered by Fastly

The challenge

QuantCDN faced significant challenges with traditional CDN solutions that struggled to meet the demands of modern web applications. Existing architectures were overly complex, costly, and inefficient, often leading to delays when implementing changes or addressing issues in real-time. Balancing the need for dynamic and static content delivery at scale was a key hurdle, especially as they sought to integrate serverless and Jamstack-focused solutions. Additionally, traditional CDNs lacked programmatic access, granular observability, and flexibility, limiting QuantCDN’s ability to optimize caching, enhance security, and provide deeper insights for their customers.

As an API-first and developer-friendly platform, QuantCDN sought to extend their existing platform, not build a CDN infrastructure from scratch. The team needed to find a cloud computing provider that offered dynamic failover capabilities, developer-friendly tools, and the real-time observability necessary to manage large-scale projects and mitigate emerging threats. These challenges, paired with the desire to innovate through edge computing, drove QuantCDN to partner with Fastly to deliver an agile, scalable, and secure platform built for the future of content delivery.

The solution

Fastly’s API-first approach empowered QuantCDN with programmatic access, granular observability, and advanced caching capabilities, enabling them to build innovative solutions tailored to modern content delivery needs. With Fastly’s robust security features, QuantCDN was able to enhance protection against emerging threats while ensuring uninterrupted service during traffic spikes or outages.

“From a technical perspective, Fastly ticked all of the boxes. Fastly Compute is incredibly flexible. And with a partner like Fastly that puts API-first and exposes low-level primitives, we can build our own solution with value-add on top of a robust networking backbone,” says Stuart Rowlands, founder of QuantCDN.

“It’s rare to find a partner like Fastly in the computing industry. We didn’t find that openness in other providers,” Rowlands continues. “From our first interactions, Fastly’s ethos mirrored our company culture. And they are technical at every level, so Fastly’s people immediately understood our problem space. They provide all the tools and support we need to succeed on the Fastly Edge Cloud Platform.”

In fact, QuantCDN was up and running in hours on the Fastly platform and has since deployed tens of thousands of times. "We have seen improved TTFB for dynamic content delivery by up to 250% in some instances and improved TTFB for static content delivery by up to 75% in some regions.” says Rowlands.

Vast network scale and instant global services

Fastly takes care of vast network scale and security for QuantCDN, explains Rowlands. “With Fastly’s capacity of 377 terabits per second (TBps) and less than 20ms latency for cache hits and 150ms for cache misses, our team has confidence that we're building our own layers of value on a robust, secure, and stable base.”

APIs and integration—from observability data to SIEMs

QuantCDN leverages the observability data provided by Fastly and shares it with its own customers. “We wanted to provide a high level of insight into how traffic flows to our customers’ sites,” Rolands says. “Fastly makes its observability data extremely accessible via API.”

QuantCDN runs their WAF and bot protection on Fastly Compute. “With Compute, we can adapt to security challenges in near real-time and keep customer sites up, even during an attack. Fastly’s rule section is a powerful way of applying logic to traffic profiles at a granular level,” he says.

Integration with existing systems is also API-first, so the QuantCDN team easily integrates logging and alerting platforms, security management (SIEM), and authentication gateways. “Fastly makes our life that much easier,” he says.

Use the best language for every task

Developers can choose from a wide range of languages. “Fastly lets us build compute services using the programing language best suited for every task,” Rowlands says. “And, since Fastly supports deploying any WebAssembly system interface (WASI), we have near infinite flexibility.” Given their background in Varnish, Rowlands’ team found it “a breeze” to port across existing VCL when they needed to provide feature parity with QuantCDN’s previous-generation platform.

Insight and control at every level

The developers at QuantCDN love having programmatic access to everything via low-level primitives, Rowlands says. “Having complete insight and control over how and where objects are cached is a big win, including at secondary and tertiary layers in the networking stack.” For example, his team leverages the programmatic nature of caching within Fastly Compute to improve performance by only doing config lookups when values have changed.

He adds that they appreciate the ability to log at any point in the request flow, which is useful for development as well as showing QuantCDN’s customers what's going on at a very low level on their own sites. In addition, control over the entire request flow and the ability to make calls to dynamic back ends enables his team to chain requests together programmatically.

Primitives Fastly provides for serverless computing enable new features. “We can create any number of serverless functions incredibly easily, and even get live previews of the result for super quick and easy development and testing.” Rowlands describes live previews built on top of QuantCDN’s code editor and revisioning system, dynamic responses that replace a token with the output of a serverless function, cron-job like scheduled function execution, and queues that enable applications that require data consistency, tracking, and logging in the order in which they are received.

Considerate support resolves issues quickly

Fastly provides a level of support that Rowlands finds both rare and valuable. “Even at the start, when we described something as crazy as building a full-fledged CDN on top of Compute, Fastly has been up for every challenge.”

Tickets are escalated and resolved rapidly. “And at every step, Fastly provides the most considerate, knowledgeable support anywhere. They resolve our issues incredibly quickly,” he says.

Key takeaway

QuantCDN moves applications and content hosted at the origin into microservices and serverless architectures—a solution that is simpler and more scalable than traditional serving architectures. “When you move to simpler models of content delivery, customers gain immediate benefits in cost, security, scalability. Though Fastly, our customers have options: traditional content delivery as well as static with dynamic delivered by the Compute-managed edge. Since moving to Fastly, 25% of our customer base has either already started to use, or plans to use our new compute capabilities.”