Fastly acquires Glitch for "yes code" at edge | Fastly

Fastly is thrilled to announce it has acquired Glitch, with plans to continue fostering one of the most beloved developer communities on the web today.  

Since our founding in 2011, Fastly has been designed to be a developer-driven platform with the ability to run code at the edge. We’ve worked closely with many customers to integrate our systems into their architecture, and their developers, and devOps have worked alongside our engineering and engineering ops team to shape our products. We want to continue to make Fastly easier to use so that developers everywhere can experience the power of the edge. 

Back in February of this year, we announced an exciting new partnership with Glitch, a “yes code” environment that allows developers to create and build full-stack web apps, to help extend their web-based development environment so that it could deploy to Fastly’s WASM-based Compute. The goal of our integration was to help make Compute more accessible through Glitch’s easy-to-use interface, allowing its community of 1.8 million developers to deploy code they’ve written on Glitch’s platform to our powerful serverless compute environment. As we worked together in the early days of our partnership, we started thinking - what might a future where we combined forces look like?

Today we're honored to welcome Glitch's team to Fastly, and look forward to getting to know and support their incredible community of users, fans and admirers.

Why we love Glitch

We're huge fans of what Glitch has built. Their powerful, flexible environment has made it incredibly easy for developers to work on full-stack web apps without having to worry about how to configure and administer a server, manage DNS, install a database, or figure out which is the best way to deploy their code. You can literally just press a button and your app is live, while Glitch takes care of the rest in the background. And while there are other platforms out there that make it easy to deploy, none of them are quite as easy as Glitch, especially at the moment of inspiration. 

Glitch also provides inspiration through its “re-mixable” code, making development even easier. If a developer likes an app created by someone else, but needs to alter it to fit in their project’s specs or scratch their own, they can simply remix and deploy it. This remix culture has allowed Glitch to create a collaborative community of developers who support each other to build amazing apps, sites, and tools. Like Wordle but want to make it about airport codes, British towns or, err, swear words? People have done all that, and more.

And that culture and ease of use also appeals to users within big companies, including Google, Stripe, Twitter, Notion and Etsy. And even with all the resources they have available, they’re still turning to Glitch to build tools, sites, prototypes, and demos. We use it internally for the same reasons and so do our customers.  

The agreement to acquire Glitch marks a huge step in our commitment to helping developers build the way they want. Compute already allows enterprise developers to build applications on Fastly’s edge network with all the performance, security, and scale they need. Now we want to unlock a world of possibilities for all developers – from innovators at small to mid-sized companies, to hobbyist developers, to large-scale organizations. The result? All the ease, approachability, and collaboration of Glitch’s community, supercharged with all the power and scalability of Fastly’s edge cloud platform. 

Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch said, “Glitch has always been about enabling creativity by making it as easy as possible to go from an idea to a live, running app. So we’re incredibly excited to be joining Fastly and bringing that power and potential to far more developers. We’re especially thrilled to think about the innovative new things people will build when we bring Fastly’s global edge network to every developer out there who’s got an idea for an app they just can’t wait to create.” 

Everything you already love about Glitch, plus a lot more

Glitch is one of the most impressive and vibrant creator communities on the Internet. And we are so proud to be part of their journey forward. Fastly has a long history in supporting the open source community, of providing resources for nonprofits, for working with customers who want to contribute to a more equitable digital community, and for speaking out for causes we believe in. We're excited to see what more our customers can do now that we're working with Glitch.

With over a decade of experience running this powerful global network, we know performance and scale. Glitch developers will enjoy access to our globally distributed platform of over 192 Tbps (as of January, 2022). Through the integration, they’ll also gain access to features like our Next-Gen WAF, Image Optimization, and perhaps most importantly, our sub millisecond cold start times with Compute. By collaborating with Glitch’s dynamic developer community, we hope to gather early feedback on new features and capabilities, and to get a fresh set of eyes on things we’ve been working on for years. 

Why does this matter? Simply put, Glitch developers will be able to focus on writing incredible code while we take care of all the rest. When deploying on Compute they'll no longer have to worry about the dreaded “Loading Project” spinner - our platform means there's no such thing as "cold" starts. And they can continue to collaborate and share code in Glitch’s creative developer community as our companies share a common vision of enabling a more open and reliable web.

What’s next?

Fastly is committed to nurturing Glitch’s developer community which we see as one of the most amazing and spirited creator communities on the internet today. We want all developers with an idea to still think of Glitch as the place they can come to experiment, test and workshop their ideas – but also a place to deploy to production, whether that's for fun or for mission critical business. Only now it will be even better than it was before - faster, instantly scalable, and more secure with enterprise grade availability and support. 

We can't wait to continue working with Glitch to create a more open and easily accessible platform for all developers to build, deploy and scale the next game-changing innovative apps—and in the meantime we'd love to hear back from you what you think.