The Weather Company forecasts accurate, reliable weather to 400 million monthly active users by partnering with Fastly

We spoke with Wendy Frazier, VP, Chief Technology Officer at The Weather Company, an IBM Business, who shared insights on how a long term partnership with Fastly helped them deliver best in class experience to their 400+ million monthly active users by:

• Maintaining a 99.9% uptime in video delivery

• Providing a resilient and innovative technology 

• Expanded edge compute capabilities, enabling GraphQL & Javascript at the edge

How has Fastly helped The Weather Company deliver a high-performance experience to your users?

Our challenge at The Weather Company is scale and volume. We connect with over 400 million monthly active users every single month. When we have severe weather events, whether it's a hurricane or winter storm, those numbers peak.

We need to make sure we have the right configuration, setup, and technology to be able to support our users. Fastly has helped with that. Fastly delivers our video technology. They deliver over hundreds of millions of requests every single day to our users. And those requests are meaningful, they're compelling because our users need that to make decisions in a very quick manner.

What made Fastly the best choice for The Weather Company?

That's easy. When you talk about Fastly, it always starts with the people, from the account managers to the technical SMEs, anyone that we interface with, seeing their passion, their drive, their commitment to us. That's first and foremost, what keeps us grounded and what my team really enjoys about working with Fastly. You bring that along with Fastly’s resilient technology and the innovation that Fastly continues to evolve on. It's a great win-win. It's a partnership you want to continue to invest in because of just those two pillars alone.

As far as the problems that Fastly has helped us solve, video delivery is top of mind. Because again, we have to provide local and national video and breaking news coverage to our users. So having that real-time delivery readily available is key. Fastly has been instrumental with a number of our triggers, our API calls. We actually just migrated a service over to Fastly, and it was seamless. 

How has Fastly helped you get to your business results quicker?

The key metrics for us are video delivery, uptime, as well as the response time as far as how quickly our users can obtain that critical information.

The SLA we’ve seen with Fastly is around 99.9. We look for that nine-nine percentile so the uptime has to be pretty much flawless, especially when you're in a hurricane and you're trying to figure out, "Do I evacuate or I don't?" Or "Are my parents safe where they're located?" Having that content readily available without any sort of friction is key.

Weather has been with Fastly since 2015, and if you weren't at that 99.9% uptime, we wouldn't still be partnering. In all seriousness, Fastly is definitely by far, from a stability perspective, scale perspective, one of the top in their field. 

How has the Weather Company and Fastly relationship evolved?  

So we've slowly continued to evolve our partnership across our entire technology ecosystem. Like I said, a large part of it, for Fastly is the way that no matter the opportunity, it's the same sort of rapport, it's the same response, it's the same quality. That is what has continued to foster this partnership and continue to have Weather as a partner with Fastly.

When we look at the Edge Cloud and how we're looking to evolve and expand in that area, it's a number of different ways. We were one of the first to move GraphQL to the edge. We were one of the first to have JavaScript running at the edge.

There's no playbook for what we're about to embark on. Metaverse is new for everybody. Helping us define the processes, the governance, what is the best way to make it work at the edge and to make it work at scale. So again, it goes back to that joint partnership, that collaboration and partnering together to figure out what the right framework, the right architecture, and the right design should be as we move into the future.

What makes you proud of what you do at The Weather Company?

What makes me proud about what I do is the impact and how we're able to help transform so many businesses and industries, and also everyday users’ daily lives. My daughter is trying to determine if she's going to a football game on Saturday and the first thing she's looking at is the 48-hour radar. She's tracking that play-by-play to see if she needs a raincoat or not. That happens every day, a million times a day with so many people.

Being able to impact the daily lives of people and to provide a meaningful data set where people can make decisions based on it is so refreshing. It's just so refreshing to just have that connection. To be able to provide that interface day in and day out is what I love most about my job.