Q2 2016 - Q3 2016

Network capacity growth

Our network capacity continues to grow month over month. We’ve been busy deploying more transit and peering capacity, including the doubling of our peering capacity at the SIX exchange in Seattle and the addition of DE-CIX in Frankfurt and New York. Network utilization grew by 16% this quarter, with a 41% increase of traffic delivered to peers through a mixture of private interconnects and exchange fabrics.

Point of presence (POP) enhancements

This quarter, we doubled our cache server capacity at several key POPs around the United States, including New York, Ashburn, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Since these are home to some of our biggest and busiest cache deployments, this represents a major upgrade to approximately 25% of our fleet.

We were also happy to announce our new Dubai POP in August. This provides lower latency delivery for markets in that region, and continues our expansion into new strategic locations around the world.

Feature releases

User interface

The next generation of the Fastly control panel built on Ember was recently released. Our new control panel allows for improved navigation, easier interpretation of data, and quicker access to existing configurations. You can opt-in by clicking the banner at the top of the existing web interface. The new control panel is also supported by a full set of public documentation at docs-next.fastly.com.

Logging

New endpoints

We’ve added API-only support in Limited Availability for SFTP, Loggly, Scalyr, and Heroku. UI support is coming soon along with support for Google PubSub and BigQuery.

Log formats

We’ve also added new features which gives you more flexibility when it comes to formatting log lines. We’ve added API-only support for more powerful log formatting and also removed the the limitation of only supporting Syslog formatted log lines which, among other things, means you can now write proper CSV and JSON.

Statistics

The API for our Real-Time Analytics API has been formalized, which will allows you to integrate Fastly stats into your dashboard. Look for more information coming soon including example API clients and a blog post on building dashboards.

Video

We’ve added various enhancements to our OTFP offering on multiple fronts:

MPEG-DASH demuxing

Until recently, Fastly packaged the video and audio tracks of a file together, known as interleaved MPEG-DASH segments. This was sufficient for many DASH-compatible video players like Shaka Player, but some require the two tracks to be in separate representations. We can now demux the video and audio tracks for better compatibility with a wider range of browsers and players, including the popular open source Dash.js player and other players built using this framework. Demuxing also allows you to have more fine-grained control over the individual tracks of your content and deliver responsive viewer experiences when switching to alternate tracks.

Media encryption enhancements

Fastly can now encrypt videos packaged into HLS (supports both Envelope/AES-128 and SAMPLE-AES methods) and MPEG-DASH (ISO/IEC 23001-7: Common encryption in ISO base media file format file) for ClearKey streaming formats. We do this by generating a unique content encryption key for each video, enabling secure video delivery to viewers. These new features further extend our at rest encryption capabilities, laying the foundation for supporting advanced features like Digital Rights Management (DRM).

TLS backend support

Fastly’s OTFP service has always supported requesting source progressive mp4 files stored on any storage service supporting HTTP, including sending authorization tokens for AWS S3 and Google Cloud Storage (GCS) private buckets. We have now extended that support for video downloads using TLS encryption, further securing distribution of your premium high-value content.

Flexible HLS delivery options

HLS delivery includes delivering manifest files, audio/video segments, and media encryption keys. These requests can be made either over HTTP or HTTPS. We’ve now removed the dependency on which protocol should be used to serve media encryption keys rather than forcing the protocol to be the same as the segments. Now, each HLS request can be independently configured to be delivered using HTTP or HTTPS, providing more granular control and flexibility of how video is delivered while also keeping segments secure.

Routing platform

We extended our DNS routing platform to allow customized routing based on POP or DNS resolver. POP overrides route traffic from one POP to another. For example, you can route all your South American traffic to the US or only serve traffic from POPs in the US and EU. Resolver overrides let you move traffic based on the DNS resolver that your clients are using. We use resolver overrides to route traffic from popular public DNS resolvers like OpenDNS and Google Public DNS using Anycast, resulting in lower latency for clients that are far away from those resolvers.

Community update

Events

This past quarter, Fastly had a presence at the following events:

• eTail East: eTail East is the premier multichannel and eCommerce conference on the East coast. Fastly sponsored and exhibited at this event.


• New York Web Perf Meetup: Fastly is a proud gold sponsor of this meetup. In August, our CTO Tyler McMullen spoke about load balancing, while our VP of Technology, Hooman Beheshti, talked about the future of Web performance the following month.


• Google Next Tokyo: Fastly discussed performance-driven scalability and Fastly's Cloud Accelerator. We were also in the partner space previewing a cool new demo experience.


• IBC: IBC is the premier annual event for professionals engaged in the creation, management and delivery of entertainment and news content worldwide. Fastly hosted multiple meetings at this event in Amsterdam.


• Denver Startup Week: The fifth annual Denver Startup Week Startup Crawl features many of the hottest startup pads in Denver. Fastly was a stop on this crawl.


• Velocity New York: At this year's Velocity, we heard stories of great success, worthy failures, and concrete technical solutions. Fastly’s VP of Technology Hooman Beheshti talked about HTTP/2, and our CTO Tyler McMullen discussed the principles of distributed systems.


• New York Video Tech Meetup: Ashok Lalwani, our Product Manager for Video, spoke about our On-The-Fly-Packager product. Watch the video here.


• DrupalCon Dublin: The largest Drupal event in Europe. Our VP of Technology Hooman Beheshti covered what no one is telling you about HTTP/2, while VP of Ops Lisa Phillips participated in a DevOps panel session.

Our engineers also spoke at Surge, Full Stack Fest (video here), Ruby Kaigi, Golang UK, VarnishCon (video here), and others.

Check out our events page to keep track of conferences we’ve been to and ones we’ll be attending in the coming months.

Open source projects we’re supporting

We’re continuing our efforts to support open source projects by donating our services. Here are some projects that have recently started using Fastly:

• Anaconda


• The Changelog


• Clojars


• LLVM


• Plyr

As always, if you have an open source project that can use Fastly services, please reach out to community@fastly.com. Want to chat with Fastly engineers and other customers using our product? Check out our Community Forum.