Ruby Central: Powering the Ruby ecosystem with Fastly

The challenge

Ruby Central, the foundation behind RubyGems, faced a significant challenge in managing the massive scale of gem downloads and installations. With 3 billion gem downloads per month and traffic from approximately 10 million unique IP addresses, the organization needed a reliable solution to handle this immense load without compromising performance or availability.

Marty Haught, Director of Open Source and long-time member of Ruby Central, explained the situation: "I couldn't imagine what that would look like if Fastly wasn't handling that for us. The gems don't change that often. They're not massively large, but they're a decent size, and they're perfect for CDNs."

The foundation also grappled with the perception that RubyGems, being built into the Ruby programming language, required little maintenance or support. This misconception led to challenges in securing funding and resources for ongoing development and infrastructure improvements.

The solution

In 2013, Ruby Central turned to Fastly's CDN to address their scaling and performance needs, and joined Fastly’s Fast Forward program, which extends free services to eligible open source projects and the nonprofits that support them. By leveraging Fastly's global network, Ruby Central was able to offload a significant portion of their traffic, ensuring smooth and efficient gem delivery to customers worldwide.

Marty emphasized the significance of Fastly's support: "Fastly makes it really easy for us so we don't have to worry about the load on the servers. Most of the traffic is people installing gems. It just works.”

The integration with Fastly allowed Ruby Central to focus on core development and infrastructure improvements rather than managing the complexities of content delivery. This partnership has been instrumental in maintaining the platform's reliability, with Marty noting, "We have had zero downtime and no full outages since 2013."

Key takeaways

Enhancing Scalability and Optimizing Infrastructure Management

Fastly’s CDN played a crucial role in enhancing Ruby Central’s scalability and performance, enabling the organization to efficiently handle an astonishing 3 billion gem downloads per month. This ensured that developers around the world could access and install gems quickly and reliably, without interruptions. Additionally, by offloading traffic to Fastly, Ruby Central improved its infrastructure management. With less strain on their internal systems, the team could redirect valuable resources toward platform development and security enhancements, strengthening the overall reliability of RubyGems.

Ensuring Reliability with a Cost-Effective, Low-Maintenance Solution

The long-term benefits of this partnership are evident in RubyGems’ outstanding uptime record, with no full outages since 2013. Fastly’s infrastructure provided the stability needed to maintain this level of reliability, reinforcing Ruby Central’s commitment to delivering a seamless experience for its users.

Beyond performance and reliability, Fastly also offered a cost-effective solution. In March 2025 alone, Fastly handled 51.28 billion requests for RubyGems.org, delivering 5.66 petabytes of data with a 98.94% hit ratio. Managing this immense volume of traffic without incurring substantial infrastructure costs was a game-changer, enabling Ruby Central to optimize resources without compromising on quality.

Additionally, Fastly’s seamless integration made day-to-day operations significantly easier for the Ruby Central team. With a “set it and forget it” approach, Fastly’s solution required minimal ongoing management, allowing our team to focus on innovation rather than constant maintenance.

Marty summed up the value of the partnership: ""The Fastly team is great, they respond whenever we need anything, which is very rarely, if something comes up, we're not worried."

Looking ahead, Ruby Central aims to raise awareness about the importance of supporting open source infrastructure and is exploring ways to enhance supply chain security and improve the developer experience for gem publishing and consumption.