imgix provides high-quality visual media experiences for customers powered by Fastly

The challenge

"Images are the most important connective tissue of the internet," according to Amanda Hassoun, a site reliability engineer at imgix. Images drive buying decisions, increase user engagement, and impact click-through rates. Poorly cropped or mis-sized images, on the other hand, degrade user experience dramatically, while uncompressed images can drag page-load times so low that users get frustrated and move on to another site.

imgix's goal is to deliver the most optimized version of an image at the quickest render time possible, so its customers can dependably provide the most inviting user experience—without diverting time and internal resources from their central mission. That's why imgix relies on Fastly.

The solution

Fastly delivers imgix the speed, observability, and reliability needed to provide the best visual media experience for its customers.

Cutting latency for lightning-fast load times

"One of the things that makes Fastly the best choice for imgix is its global scale," Hassoun said. "This ensures that our users are always loading their assets at the quickest time possible.” imgix uses Fastly's global network to cache images and videos at CDN edge nodes around the world. As a result, imgix shines on metrics that matter, like low latency, low error rates, and high cache-hit ratios. By utilizing Fastly caching at the edge nodes, our images are delivered in 49.97ms on average.

imgix also cuts latency with Fastly shielding, which reduces the number of trips to the origin. "Fastly's shielding feature is extremely important to us. It reduces our number of requests by 10-12% which is a direct infrastructure cost savings," Hassoun said. In addition to cost savings, by not having to fetch an asset all the way from the customer's origin, imgix can return request results up to 89.1% faster. This reduction helps imgix maintain optimal performance and ensures a smoother, faster experience for their customers’ end users.

Maximizing data value through observability tools

imgix uses Fastly's real-time observability capabilities in business-critical ways, enhancing product development and customer experience. Fastly's integration with Google BigQuery as a logging endpoint streamlines troubleshooting, analytics, customer support, and billing. "Fastly data is incredibly important for us. After continuous deployments, it allows us to verify that changes did not have a customer-facing impact in real time," Hassoun said. imgix also uses Fastly to enable debug logs at the request level, which makes troubleshooting faster and easier.

imgix charges customers based on the number of unique images they serve, so detail and accuracy are vital. Real-Time Logging, that is built-in to Fastly’s delivery services, gives imgix the fine-grained information they need to bill accurately and share information transparently with customers. As most of imgix's customers have their own customers, providing customer-specific data for their analytics is an important part of imgix's service. "If we can't get the data at the right grain via domain names, it's not going to be useful for us," said Hassoun, "The fact that we're able to get to that level with Fastly is essential to our business."

Safeguarding stability with a solution and support team you can count on

"One of the biggest values we get out of working with Fastly is how highly available and reliable it is," said Hassoun. Fastly promises, and delivers, greater than 99.99% uptime. imgix depends on that uptime to delight their customers.

The reliability applies not only to the platform but to Fastly support. Problems have been rare and consistently resolved quickly. "Working with the Fastly support team has always been a great experience," Hassoun said. "It's really impressive that they're very technical, and if they can't respond to the specific problem we're having, they always find the right person to resolve it. I would rate Fastly support at a 10, multiple times over!"

Key takeaway

imgix delivers optimized, error-free images as quickly as possible for its customers with Fastly's CDN and real-time visibility capabilities. Fastly's edge network and shielding capabilities help imgix reduce latency for all of their customers. Fastly's observability tools give imgix fine-grained data in near real-time to support both its developers and customers. Fastly’s reliability and top-notch support make them a reliable partner on which to build a reliable technology stack.