Switching to Fastly cuts purge time from 15 minutes to just seconds

Slate came to Fastly after discovering that their legacy CDN lacked the agility to purge content and complete updates at the speed of their business. Waiting for a change to go live could take as much as 15 minutes, an eternity in digital media. Charges on a per-service basis and requiring XML for updates from an already busy team of developers also nudged Slate to make a change.

Making the switch to Fastly’s edge cloud network cut Slate’s update time from 15 minutes to less than 5 seconds. And with no extra cost to spin up a new domain, developers could start testing new features and services without waiting for an expense approval.

Fastly enables a whole new business channel

In 2019, Slate launched Supporting Cast, a podcasting membership platform that allows podcasters and their networks to offer exclusive episodes and audiobooks.

To make podcasts available only to active subscribers, Supporting Cast provides an individual RSS feed for each user — every episode’s URL is unique to a specific subscriber. If a membership expires, the team can cut off access using Fasty's surrogate key purge to expire that user’s specific mp3s.

Surrogate key purging can be applied not just to single mp3s but entire episodes, series, or users. In most podcast apps, granular purgingallows podcasters to make a quick change, say, uploading a new version of an episode should there be a mistake. Supporting Cast can now expire the episode for every subscriber at once, or if a specific user quits the service, it can expire that user's entire feed.

Fastly empowers Slate to grow without limits

The podcast service has seen notable growth, with tens of thousands of users joining each month. With Supporting Cast still signing new podcasts every week — including big broadcasters — Lavallee said the team appreciates that, with Fastly, they never need to fret about traffic volume before adding new content.

Slate developers deploy faster on Fastly

One of the big differences Slate developers have enjoyed since switching to Fastly is its compatibility with a CI/CD production environment. While their legacy CDN functioned like a black box, Fastly opens the doors for anyone who can code to make and deploy changes. For Slate and Supporting Cast, that means configurations can be deployed immediately — instead of being held up while they're routed through systems administration.

Fastly innovation helps Slate keep growing

As Fastly continues to enhance its platform and offerings, Slate has taken advantage of other solutions in the Fastly portfolio. The company adopted Fastly's Image Optimizer to crop and serve all their images on the fly, so they can maintain only the original image in Slate's data store. "That's much better than us having to keep up with the latest image technology and making the code changes ourselves," Lavallee said.

Logging has also been a useful tool for Slate. The company sends data directly to BigQuery for analytics. With visibility into its own data and control over its code, Slate can circumvent costly ways of tracking with only minimal effort for engineers. "Fastly’s logging options are fantastic," said Lavallee.

Slate developers also appreciate the accessibility and skill of Fastly support when these new solutions are implemented. "For example," Lavallee said, "when we were having trouble figuring out how to configure our shielding, I worked with some of the top Fastly engineers on a Zoom call to fix the problem and review the code together. That rarely happens with a vendor."