Q4 2015 - Q1 2016

Traffic growth

Compared to the madness of the holiday season, this quarter has been a relatively quiet one, with the exception of the Super Bowl. As a CDN, Fastly is in a unique position to help companies handle the load of successful Super Bowl ads, and monitor the results in real time. On average, we saw a 74x increase in requests per second for our customers with ads. One particularly popular ad drew 190x more requests per second than usual, traffic which we handled seamlessly as visitors rushed to engage with the brand online.

Point of presence (POP) enhancements

Over the last quarter, we've deployed hardware upgrades to eastern and central North America. This work represents a capacity increase of 16% of our global footprint, with more hardware caching augments in the works to improve performance.

To accommodate this growth, we have made a 10% increase in our network capacity to key transit partners, internet exchange points, and private peers. We have joined key Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) across the world, including Equinix Exchanges in North America and Asia, LONAP in London, BBIX in Japan, and Megaport and WAIX throughout Australia. Finally, we are peering on the Brazilian IX in São Paulo.

You can learn more about Fastly's Peering Policy at https://www.fastly.com/peering and our peering footprint at PeeringDB: http://as54113.peeringdb.com/.

Feature releases

Audit Logs (API only)

Audit Logs are now accessible via the API, and will help you keep track of changes to your service, including which changes were made, when, and by whom. Audit Logs will also help you secure your configurations, improve monitoring, and conduct better troubleshooting and debugging when abnormal behavior arises.

Current supported events include:

• Version management: version activation, version deactivation, and version lock


• User behavior: login, logout, failed login, locked, unlocked, and password updated


• Security: 2FA enabled, 2FA disabled, and API key creation


• Account management: new invitation, invitation accepted, user updated, user deleted, new company addition, and company settings updated


• Billing: pricing plan change and billing contact change


• Purge all


• Configuration setting (creation, deletion, and update): domain, backend, header, health check, cache setting, request setting, logging endpoint, VCL file, gzip setting, and synthetic response

Audit Logs are API-only for now, and the feature is currently in Limited Availability. For more information, please see our API documentation.

Magento 1 Extension  

We’re pleased to announce support for the Magento 1 Extension. Magento is a leading ecommerce platform that powers 30% of the Alexa top ecommerce sites. The Magento 1 Extension will help merchants seamlessly speed up their customers’ online shopping experience while minimizing infrastructure costs.

Magento already has great support for Varnish thanks to an extension developed by Phoenix Media. We partnered with Phoenix Media and the Magento Community to rebuild this extension on top of Fastly, taking advantage of Fastly-specific features such as surrogate keys, GeoIP, crypto extensions, and Origin Shield.

The Magento 1 Extension is available on our GitHub page. Try it out and let us know what you think — we look forward to your feedback. We also support the extension as part of the Fastly ecommerce package.

Logging to Google Cloud Storage

We now support log streaming to Google Cloud Storage endpoints, continuing the relationship between Fastly and Google. Back in 2014, we announced our Cloud Accelerator, which combined the power of Google’s infrastructure with the speed of our real-time content delivery network. To this end, we continue to front content stored on Google’s Cloud Storage platform.

You can read more about this logging functionality in our docs. Please email our support team for help or suggestions for other integrations with Google.

MPEG-DASH support

This past quarter we released On-the-Fly Packaging support for MPEG-DASH, which will help you further offload origin traffic and deliver on-demand videos when they’re requested. With the addition of MPEG-DASH, Fastly now supports packaging of the most common streaming formats (HLS, HDS, and MPEG-DASH). This packaging also supports the most widely adopted specification version (ISO/IEC 23009-1:2014) for videos transcoded with AVC / H264 video and AAC audio codecs.

If you’re interested in Video-on-Demand, Streaming Media, or MPEG-DASH, please contact sales@fastly.com

Multi-Language Subtitle/Closed Captioning

Fastly’s On-the-Fly Packaging service now includes support for multi-language subtitles and closed captioning both in-band (CEA 608/708 specification) and out-of-band (WebVTT) to help you comply with FCC regulations for captioning internet videos.

If you’re interested in Video-on-Demand or Streaming Media, please contact sales@fastly.com

Trick Play for HLS packaging

We recently released Trick Play support for HLS in our On-the-Fly Packaging service. Trick Play lets you provide a much better navigation experience to your users by showing scenes from the video during fast-forwarding and rewinding. Additionally, Trick Play helps you comply with the HLS Authoring Specification for Apple TV.

If you’re interested in Video-on-Demand or Streaming Media, please contact sales@fastly.com

Video Delivery Insights

In our continued effort to give our customers more visibility, our On-the-Fly Packaging service now exposes additional video metrics in VCL, including:

• Video segment starting presentation time


• Video segment duration


• Video resolution

Using our real-time streaming logs, these metrics can be passed to third-party services for storage and analysis, delivering better insights into audience engagement.

If you’re interested in Video-on-Demand or Streaming Media, please contact sales@fastly.com

Company Enforced Two-Factor Authentication (Beta)

At Fastly, we care about the security of your content. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) is an extra layer of security that requires not only a username and password but also a code or passphrase that only the user has access to. Previously, you could turn on 2FA across your organization, but individual users could choose whether to enable it or not. Now in Beta, we’ve made it possible for you to enforce these settings at the company and individual level. Individuals users will not be able to log into Fastly without setting this up, greatly reducing support and monitoring time.

If you’re interested in joining the beta program for Company Enforced Two-Factor Authentication, please contact support@fastly.com.

Routing Platform

We recently released a custom-built DNS routing platform that gives us more flexible ways to route your users to the nearest Fastly POP. The platform improves performance and allows us to reduce load on certain POPs as they get busy. In addition to the basic performance gains, we can do custom optimizations that target individual customers and locations for improvements. This provides an unprecedented degree of control and we're excited to use it to make Fastly even faster. We'll provide more details in the coming months as we migrate customers over to the platform.

New services

DDoS Mitigation Service  

Fastly now has a new DDoS mitigation service, designed to protect you from Layer 3, Layer 4, and complex Layer 7 attacks. You can choose one of two options as an add-on to your CDN service. Both plans provide additional mitigation support for DDoS protection for HTTP (port 80) and HTTPS (port 443, TLS) services with unlimited overage protection:

• DDoS protection and mitigation service: This is a 12-month service commitment  designed to minimize your risk with continuous protection on an annual basis.


• DDoS threat response service: This is a month-to-month service, ideal for immediate response to a DDoS threat or ongoing DDoS attack.

If you’re interested in our DDoS mitigation services, please contact sales@fastly.com.

Bug Fixes

• 
  

  OTFP now more gracefully handles certain broken audio tracks in source mp4 files.

  
  

Community update

Events

This past quarter, Fastly had a presence at the following events:

• SFRails Meetup, a popular Rails meetup based in San Francisco. Fastly HQ hosted the meetup, and you can catch the video of talks here.


• eTail West, a one-stop shop for all things multi-channel and ecommerce. Our team was on hand to exhibit.


• Fastly Security Speaker series, a new series bringing security researchers to Fastly. Rolf Rolles and Alex Pinto spoke. You can catch the talks here and here.


• RSA, a conference to connect with the technology, trends, and people that will protect our digital world. Fastly exhibited at the event.


• Game Developers Conference, the world's largest and longest-running professionals-only game industry event. Fastly sponsored and exhibited.


• EmberConf, the flagship event of the Ember community. Our own Jade Applegate spoke and our UX team exhibited.

Check out our events page to keep track of which conferences we’ve been to and which ones we’ll be attending in the coming months.

Open source projects we’re supporting

We’re continuing our efforts to support open source projects by donating our services. Here are some projects that have recently started using Fastly:

• Hex.pm


• browserfeatures.io


• Exercism

As always, if you have an open source project that can use Fastly services, please reach out to community@fastly.com. Want to chat with Fastly engineers and other customers using our product? Check out our Community Forum.