We recently conversed with David Annez, Head of Engineering at loveholidays, who gave us the below key stats on the difference he and team are seeing since working with Fastly:

• 18% performance improvement in time to first byte.


• 10-15% reduction in image size using Fastly’s Image Optimizer


• Ability to add new features onto the website within a millisecond, with our experimentation platform on the edge - which is incredibly fast

Our engineering approach involves a lot of experimentation. We roll out new features and learn from them right away. With our experimentation platform on the edge, our engineers can experiment confidently at speed—and quickly get feedback from actual customers.

As we add new features and the loveholidays website becomes more complex, we want to continue to deliver a really high-performing experience to every customer.

How has Fastly helped you deliver a high-performing website?

I’ve been using Fastly for eight years and have generally found it to be the fastest CDN. Additionally, with Fastly, we can configure and tweak our platform continuously. We continue to see performance improvements as beta testers for Fastly. We trialed HTTP/3 and saw an 18% performance improvement in time to first byte (TTFB), which is impressive.HTTP/3 combined with Brotli, a new compression system, gives our customers better performance and a much faster experience.

We also tested and analyzed the updated Fastly Image Optimizer, which supports AVIF, a new image format. We measured a 10-15% reduction in image size for all our core images, quite a bit smaller than WebP, which then reduces our bandwidth usage.

How has Fastly helped you innovate and deploy faster?

Fastly's deployment and experimentation mechanisms are powerful. When starting to use Fastly’s Compute edge serverless platform, we adapted it based on our own discovery and Fastly’s engineering feedback. Now we also use the Fastly Terraform Provider to manage both Compute and our normal Fastly service.

Our engineers can push code straight into staging, see their changes almost immediately, and roll the code into production confidently. A/B tests performed on our experimentation platform on the edge roll out within a minute, and we can add new features onto the website within a millisecond of running it—which is really, really fast.

How has your use of Fastly changed over time?

I've been at loveholidays for three years, and at the beginning we just used Fastly as a caching mechanism—that’s how most CDNs worked historically. Over time, we've become a lot more confident and moved features to Fastly, such as controlling cookies, redirects, and now our experimentation platform. A lot of our core logic now sits on the edge.

In the near future, we plan to move even more) logic to the edge, where it will be more configurable.

What makes you proud of what you do at loveholidays?

I’m excited by the team I work with. We are always thinking about new ways to deliver a really fast and scalable website. Our engineering culture constantly pushes technology barriers and tries new things—adding new features while also building a scalable platform. I love that I can see the impact and benefit of our work on our customers. Not only do we provide fantastic user experience and make it easier for travelers to book a vacation, but it’s also exciting to see that they come back to book more vacations.

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