Built with Fastly: Northflank’s Developer Platform

Since its inception, a core mission for Fastly has been to support engineering teams that build, secure, and scale web applications and digital experiences worldwide. That includes supporting the ecosystem of startups that also solve problems in the space. In this post, we have a conversation with Northflank, a rapidly growing startup helping teams of any size build, deploy, and scale production workloads. We explore the requirements of modern platform engineering, Northflank’s unique approach to developing workload-centric infrastructure strategies, and how Fastly’s products assist them in reaching their ambitious goals.

Leveraging Fastly to Build Future-Proof Platforms

Northflank is a developer platform designed to help engineers deploy their workloads to production environments within core and edge clouds. These workloads are defined in code and typically include microservices, databases, and jobs. They leverage Kubernetes as the operating system, which enables a seamless platform within a customer's cloud account. Northflank can serve as the application platform for any Kubernetes service—GKE, AKS, EKS, and more—through its unified management and deployment tooling in a Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployment model. This allows teams to concentrate on shipping features to production without the hassle of managing YAML configurations across multiple redundant vendors. Also, Northflank is a heavy user of Fastly’s products and manages its Fastly configurations via its own service.

Many teams currently build their infrastructures using Terraform; however, Terraform’s abstraction is focused on infrastructure and vendor-specific nuances. It doesn't effectively describe applications, build or deployment processes, or disaster recovery strategies. Rather than requiring users to define a static infrastructure set first, Northflank users begin by building and defining the application. Then, Northflank provisions and manages the production infrastructure across the relevant vendors. 

Saving Developer Cycles, Enabling Creativity

For teams seeking unified CDN administration with the rest of their infrastructure — especially those who may be new to a CDN — Northflank has built integrations with Fastly's products. These integrations keep core and edge systems integrated and semantically similar for platform teams. Additionally, Northflank’s networking stack enables Fastly administration at a granular, per-service level. This feature allows users to configure custom configuration code and advanced caching options in seconds, provisioning them directly into the Fastly network.

This ties into one of Northflank’s key benefits to customers: reduction in mean time to deployment, ultimately enabling faster, safer testing and iteration. Leveraging the use of instantly provisioned preview environments, users can complete their testing more efficiently across all their infrastructure vendors, including Fastly. As a result, teams can merge and deploy workloads to production at the core and edge quickly.

Platform TLS as a Revenue Accelerator

As a platform builder, Northflank leverages Fastly’s Platform TLS to engineer the fastest TLS provisioning experience possible for end users without transferring TLS certificates manually. This supports the seamless core and edge development experience, allowing Northflank customers to integrate CDN and Security functionality directly into their application design from the start. This agility has also enabled Northflank to secure several enterprise deals due to faster provisioning in the field than competitors.

The Future of Platforms

Northflank was founded to help software teams focus on shipping applications, bypassing the overhead of building and managing infrastructure and homegrown developer platforms. By exposing the full capabilities of Kubernetes through a powerful abstraction, software teams avoid infrastructure toil and accelerate product delivery. Developers expect a fast, secure, frictionless development experience, and vendors must deliver on these expectations. Ultimately, Fastly and Northflank share this mission to provide platform engineers, security engineers, and infrastructure teams with the modern tools they need to succeed.

If you’re a startup ready to make your applications safer, faster, and more dynamic in an instant, sign up for a free Fastly developer account.