Why Fastly

As a platform built by and for independent creators, Big Cartel works to maintain their values as their user base grows, which includes fostering an agile tech team. Fastly’s edge cloud platform enables the team to focus on what matters — creating an easy-to-use platform for artists — while helping them tackle technical challenges, like DDoS mitigation, image optimization, and maintaining reliable user experiences.

Fastly offers Big Cartel unprecedented flexibility, empowering them to create and upload their own Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) for full control over the platform they provide to customers. Big Cartel uses Fastly’s CDN to cache the static assets on their sites — including the blog and documentation — as well as accelerate dynamic content. They rely on Fastly’s Instant Purge™ to ensure fresh content while delivering a great experience for their customers.

Protecting customers from the changing DDoS landscape

According to Arbor Networks, DDoS attack size has increased 1,233% in the past five years, with a CAGR of 68%. Big Cartel has also observed the same trend, as well as a shift from layer 3 and 4 attacks to layer 7 — with traffic spiking 1,000 times their normal load. They turned to Fastly’s cloud security offerings to help them provide consistent and secure experiences for their user base, including Fastly’s DDoS mitigation to defend against attacks of varying scales.

With Fastly’s real-time log streaming, Big Cartel can proactively monitor traffic patterns and instantly update their configurations to block malicious traffic at the edge, before it reaches their origin.

This script pulls Big Cartel’s streaming logs and detects abusive IPs, allowing them to issue API calls to Fastly’s access control lists (ACLs) to enact a temporary ban at the edge for those client IPs. They also use Fastly to serve synthetic responses in case they happen to block legitimate traffic.

Image optimization + reduced bandwidth costs

Images are critical to the ecommerce experience — if consumers can’t see a product clearly, they’re unlikely to purchase. Big Cartel recently moved to Fastly’s Image Optimizer and are already seeing an improvement in performance compared to their previous provider.