Press releases

Spotify taps Fastly Managed CDN to optimize performance for 100M+ users

SAN FRANCISCO — October 26, 2016 — Fastly, the real-time Content Delivery Network (CDN), today announced general availability of the Fastly Managed CDN -- an industry-first offering that provides businesses with powerful, custom-built CDN solutions based on customers’ specific needs. The Managed CDN offering combines a customer’s existing network infrastructure with Fastly’s content delivery platform. Ideal for top 300 businesses and content producers responsible for large, dynamic datasets, the Fastly Managed CDN provides customers like Spotify full visibility, control and robust security oversight while dramatically reducing delivery and operations costs and improving user experience.

Historically, companies that rely on a high-traffic, content-driven business model had to dedicate internal resources and budget to building and managing their own CDN -- a complex and expensive challenge without the expertise, scale and cost benefits delivered by a CDN provider. These companies are now transitioning away from traditional CDNs to highly scalable custom solutions designed for their needs. With this announcement, Fastly is the first major provider to offer a custom-built CDN for businesses that need a dedicated, secure network built on their own infrastructure with the scale, performance, real-time control and cost benefits of an advanced CDN.

With over 100 million highly engaged listeners in 60 markets worldwide, Spotify must be able to deliver a vast amount of data instantly and innovate quickly, without any delay or latency issues. Spotify and Fastly collaborated on designing a managed CDN product that met Spotify’s exacting standards for performance, reliability and security. Fastly deployed the Managed CDN in Spotify data centers, then enabled intelligent caching, load balancing and application logic at the network edge through Fastly’s advanced edge management and delivery capabilities. Fastly has now scaled its Managed CDN offering and is making the service widely available.

“Spotify’s users expect immediate access to their favorite songs, podcasts and playlists, at home, work, and anywhere in between,” said Niklas Gustavsson, Principal Engineer at Spotify. “Fastly is a critical part of our toolkit, helping us deliver an amazing listening experience. Fastly helps us innovate on content delivery and ensure high quality performance for our users around the world.”

Benefits of the Fastly Managed CDN include:

• Data at the Edge: A Managed CDN allows Fastly customers with particularly large working datasets to cache more data at the edge to offload origin servers, increase their cache hit ratio and ultimately reduce costs while improving performance for end users.


• Flexible Management: By placing POPs in their own data centers, Fastly’s Managed CDN customers can leverage the benefits of a DIY CDN solution without building out the team or software – including the ability to manage their own network operations costs and data center rates, as well as leverage privileged peering relationships for bandwidth savings.


• Security: With the dedicated hardware of a Managed CDN, businesses are able to keep their TLS certificates in their own datacenters, segregate content from other customers, and keep full control over the machines, including who can access them.


• Private Shield: Customers have the option to push Fastly out as a private shield in front of 100 percent of their content. In this scenario, Fastly acts as the origin -- even for multiple CDNs -- allowing businesses to take advantage of Fastly’s higher cache hit ratio and custom configurability.

"It makes operational and economic sense for large organizations to bring content delivery in-house" said Fastly CEO Artur Bergman. "We are proud to provide the underlying technology and management for some of the largest Managed CDNs in the world."

To learn more about Fastly’s Managed CDN, contact: managed@fastly.com.