Fast Forward: Let’s build the good internet together

At Fastly, we’ve always believed in protecting the good things and good people on the web. Our mission is to build—and support others in building—a space that lets good things thrive online. 

We founded our Open Source Program in 2014 on that simple idea. As a critical part of the internet’s infrastructure, we must give back to the communities and projects that enable us to exist. Plus, we know that communities working together openly, transparently, and collaboratively build better technology: more featureful apps, fewer bugs and vulnerabilities, and frictionless, delightful experiences. Moreover, we believe that the experience of using the web becomes more inclusive when there is broader representation among the people building it.

Today, we’re thrilled to share how we’re expanding on that mission with the launch of Fast Forward: a set of programs designed to empower and support developers, open source projects, and nonprofits that share our vision of an internet that is free, open, and safe for all.

Our work begins at the lowest layer of the internet. Since Fastly’s inception, we’ve been involved with organizations like the IETF, W3C, and more to contribute to the protocols and standards that govern the way data is transferred across the internet and the way internet systems coordinate and cooperate. Fastly is a founding member of the Bytecode Alliance along with Red Hat, Mozilla, and Intel, which is dedicated to creating secure new software and building on standards such as WebAssembly (Wasm) and WebAssembly System Interface (WASI), as well as implementations of those standards like Wasmtime and Cranelift. We’re a contributing member of the IETF’s HTTP/3 and QUIC working group, protocols designed to improve the long tail of internet connectivity for rural areas and mobile devices. In addition, we work alongside industry partners to contribute to visionary technologies that improve the internet ecosystem. For example, we worked alongside Microsoft and Google to contribute to Apple’s recent privacy and security-focused initiatives: Private Access Tokens, Private Relay, and Passkeys. 

Our work continues with the way we support Fastlyans to use and contribute to open source projects, as well as projects we open source ourselves. Open source is crucial to Fastly, as it is for any organization that exists online. It’s part of our heritage, too. Our original CDN is built on open source Varnish, and as we move into the future, Wasm is the crucial underpinning of our serverless compute environment, Compute. Internally, we institute policies and build systems that support, celebrate, and enable Fastylans to work with open source technologies and communities. Fastly is a proud maintainer of projects like H2O, quicly, wit-bindgen, Pushpin, WAF Efficacy, and more. We’re excited to share more news about enabling open source and making it easy for you to contribute to our projects in the coming weeks and months. 

A crucial aspect of our work to build a safer internet is the kinds of customers we serve. We have a long-standing policy for our customer community, which states that we only work with customers and partners who reflect Fastly’s values. We’ve invested in building a consistent process for determining who our technology serves – inspired by the Manila Principles of Intermediary Liability set forth by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a long-standing Fast Forward program member – and we do not want to shirk responsibility or accountability.  We know we won’t always get this right; these problems are tricky, and the ways bad actors attack our technical and societal systems are constantly evolving. That’s why we welcome our customers and our community to tell us how to help protect the internet and make it a better place. We'll also keep working to re-earn your trust in the future.

And last but certainly not least, Fast Forward is how we support you, the open source community. We’ve committed $50 million in free services to open source projects and the nonprofits that support them because your work inspires us. We’ve seen what you can do: millions of contributors working together to map the world, education and web resources bridging the digital divide, engineers building ever more efficient and portable programming languages, and more. We’re here to catalyze your creativity because you should never worry about what your project’s success will cost you – and because the only thing more electrifying than what you’ve done is the epic, powerful, and world-changing things you’re going to do next.

Let’s dream of the web as it should be. It’s beautiful. It’s a place that encourages everyone to connect, create, feel welcome, and dream big, no matter their skill level, their background, their race, creed, religion, or preferences. 

Together, we can make the internet a better place: Fast Forward ⏩