THG gains instantaneous delivery, developer control, and peace of mind with Fastly

THG, formerly The Hut Group, is a vertically integrated, digital first consumer grands group that operates three distinct businesses in beauty, nutrition and ingenuity. In 2017, the company launched THG Ingenuity Cloud Services, an ecommerce platform that provides web hosting, content delivery, and management for consumer goods for companies.

The challenge

Creating a brilliant ecommerce experience starts with three things: excellent performance, reliable security, and continual front-end and back-end improvements. Unfortunately, THG’s legacy CDN wasn’t delivering. And users outside of THG’s native UK experienced slow load times, security engineers were getting escalation calls in the middle of the night, and configuration changes required submitting requests to the vendor and waiting days to see it happen.

"THG has a policy of not getting stuck with a single strategic vendor—we like to be in charge of our own destiny," said Abraham Ingersoll, THG's Chief Security Officer. THG began looking for a new CDN platform designed for modern ecommerce needs. "Legacy platforms don't always keep up with the times," Ingersoll said. "They may have a massive network and good engineers, but the product management isn't there. New offerings feel bolted-on, and not as deeply thought through." Fortunately, THG found the exact opposite in Fastly’s tightly integrated platform.

The solution

"Traffic went up 20%-30% after [Fastly]. The page speed and Lighthouse scores have all improved. Fastly was an enabler, and without it, our time to market would have been much longer." said Ingersoll.

Doing more at the edge translates to instantaneous delivery—everywhere

THG websites serve a global customer base, and users in China, Australia, and North America expect an experience as speedy as users in the UK. "With Fastly, it is incredibly easy to get that speed consistent across the globe," said Schalk Van Der Merwe, THG’s Chief Technology Officer. "In the past, when I looked at our websites while in the US, it was never zippy, never instantaneous. Now the snappiness of the images in the product pages is incredible—it feels like the website is native."

Performance gains were one of THG's primary motivators for switching from its incumbent CDN solution, and that’s just what THG got. "Fastly gives me the confidence of knowing that content delivery will be fast and every customer is going to have a good experience," said Van Der Merwe. "That, to me, is invaluable. Now, I can focus on the back-end systems and the core of the platform without wondering whether the webpage will display." Van Der Merwe added that with Fastly Compute, cold starts for instantiating something are much faster. “We no longer have to go and warm up caches or do any additional prep,” said Van Der Merwe.

THG also uses Fastly Image Optimizer to cut page load times and reduce manual effort. "Image optimization has been a godsend for us," said Van Der Merwe. While preparing to go live with a website for a key client, THG discovered that the images weren't ready, and using its legacy solution would have caused big delays. "Image Optimizer absolutely saved the project, and it made us look like heroes," Van Der Merwe said. "If we didn’t do that, we were going to be three or four weeks late waiting for the hundreds of thousands of images to load. We would have had to have a difficult conversation with our client if Fastly didn’t come to the rescue, and for that, I'll be eternally grateful.”

No false positives means better protection with fewer distractions

"The bad guys never sleep," Van Der Merwe said, "and there's no way I could sleep without knowing we have the power of the Next-Gen WAF in front of us." When THG first onboarded with Fastly, the team was concerned about the false positives most WAFs generate but decided to give the Fastly Next-Gen WAF a test run. Within weeks, the team was completely sold on it. “Prior to enabling the WAF as part of the Fastly platform, our engineers were getting two or three escalations per week during non-business hours. After they implemented the security tools from Fastly, that went to nearly zero,” said Van Der Merwe.

“We turned Fastly on, and suddenly all the malicious stuff, all the basic application-level attacks that used to trigger our operations center were automatically dealt with. It’s hard to quantify cost or value on that, but I can sleep better.” said Ingersoll."Once we discovered that we could use the WAF in blocking mode without worrying about false positives, we were really disappointed that we hadn't tried it sooner." Ingersoll said engineers personally thanked him for adding the WAF because they were no longer getting escalation calls overnight. Now the team can now focus on product creation instead of firefighting.

The shift to Fastly has also had a valuable business impact, especially as THG scales its usage. "It quickly became apparent that the Next-Gen WAF was worth way more than what we'd been paying an engineer to handle. With our legacy solution, it was fairly routine to explain to executives that a website had been offline for a period of time because of an attack. With Fastly, that conversation doesn't happen anymore."

Transparent, accessible tools give developers superpowers

"One thing that makes THG special is that we really like to build things," said Ingersoll. "That's what I enjoy in my day-to-day work, and I want every engineer at THG to be in that position. With Fastly at our disposal, I can say to anyone, 'Hey, if you have an idea, if you want to launch something, here are the tools you need.'"

Ingersoll named Fastly's VCL as one of the features he is most impressed by. Even engineers who were unfamiliar with it took to VCL quickly. "It worked well and felt good to everybody who used it—we were like ducks to water," said Ingersoll. "People were empowered to take ownership, and that then unlocked a lot of value as engineers could think about how they handle traffic, caching, and different integrations with other services. Once you understand it, it's a superpower.”

The flexibility and transparency of Fastly's solution, especially compared to a traditional black box CDN, set THG's teams free to build and optimize according to THG's priorities and timetable. Van Der Merwe agreed: "We can give developer control to the application owners, and they can specifically identify how they need to improve their applications."

Van Der Merwe added, "Our previous solution didn't have the ability for our developers to interact for continuous delivery. To get something done, I needed to send in a PO and wait four days to make a change on my platform. We can't operate that way in a 24/7 global environment. With Fastly, we can get up and running and make the changes when we need to. It's hard to put a dollar amount on that."

Key takeaways

By switching to Fastly, THG achieved performance gains, hands-off threat protection, and the freedom for developers to make continual improvements based on the company's priorities and customer needs. Ingersoll got an early proof point for the benefits of switching to Fastly while attending a music festival in the middle of nowhere using a very congested network. "Sites that were behind Fastly magically loaded. Things like that really matter, and that's the edge performance gain you get by using Fastly."

The THG engineering team also got something unfamiliar: calm. “The peace of mind I've gotten from Fastly is something new," said Van Der Merwe. Ingersoll agreed: "You can really tell Fastly is an organization built by engineers for other engineers, and it still operates that way."