Compute is now available to all with a free trial

As of today, Compute — recently named a “Leader” in The Forrester New Wave: Edge Development Platforms report — is available for everyone to use, and we’re throwing in free credits so you can explore the platform with no strings attached. 

To get started, sign up for a free Fastly account, navigate to the “Compute” tab to start a new service, then follow the on-screen directions to set up your first service and get started.

Not sure where to go from there? Read on for a crash course in how to stand up an experiment and experience the flexibility, security, and power of Compute for yourself.

 Step 1: Choose a project

If you’re looking for a fun experiment just to play around, check out how we ported the iconic video game DOOM to Compute, or look through our use case library for inspiration. If you prefer to test real business impact, I’d recommend picking one of our starter kits to jumpstart a small project and get learnings to scale. 

For this post, take a look at our static content starter kit. Compute helps you apply performance, security, and usability upgrades to static bucket services like Google Cloud Storage and AWS S3. You can remove extra headers or add security-related ones, strip query strings, as well as dynamically serve up a 404 page and redirect requests for directories to index.html.

Step 2: Time box an experiment

Next, zero in on what metrics you want to focus on in order to quickly evaluate how edge computing can help your business. With the static content example, you’ll want to look at the performance upgrades, using page load time as our primary metric. Now that you know what use case you want to experiment with and how you’ll be defining success, you can begin to test Compute. 

Your free trial includes USD $50 (or the in-region equivalent) in compute credits, which you can use to run this experiment. Follow these steps to get started:

1. Log in or create a new Fastly account.

2. In the “Compute” section, click "Create Compute service" and follow the prompts to install the Fastly CLI.

3. In the CLI, use fastly compute init to get started and select the "Static Content" starter kit.

Step 3: Analyze and expand

Once your experimentation period has concluded, take some time to reflect on the results, including the metrics you impacted and the overall process. A few questions you might want to consider are: 

• What improvements did you see on the success metrics you defined?

• What other improvements did you see? 

• What worked well? 

• Where might you want to add in some additional support?

Armed with your experiment results and key process learnings, you’re ready to expand your edge computing exploration.

What’s next?

If you’re coming up on code change freezes or year-end periods for research and experimentation, this is a perfect time to explore Compute in depth — for free. 

Check out our Developer Hub for demos, starter kits, and tutorials to get a head start on your next experiment. And if you're ready to go further, for a limited time you can get $100k/month in edge compute credits for nine months as an incentive to start building now.