Q1'17 - Q2'17

Network capacity growth

In Q2 2017, Fastly reached 13 Tbps of connected global capacity, which represents 30% growth in the last 3 months. Our team continues to aggressively expand direct interconnections through various partner networks, joining internet exchange points and increasing our IP transit capacity. In our Tokyo (NRT) POP, we quadrupled our interconnection capacity on the BBIX exchange.

Point of presence (POP) additions & enhancements

We’re happy to announce that we’ve added new POPs in Newark (EWR) — we name our POPs after their nearby airport code — and Chicago (MDW), dramatically increasing our edge cloud capacity in North America. These locations feature our new MegaPOP64 design, which leverages native 25Gb/sec connectivity to cache servers and high density 100Gb/sec port capacity for connectivity to upstream IP transit providers and partner networks. We also launched a new POP in Johannesburg (JNB) to further reduce latency and increase performance for sites delivered by Fastly throughout southern Africa. We’ve continued our work south of the equator by doubling the size of our Melbourne (MEL) POP. To learn more, check out VP of Infrastructure Tom Daly’s Altitude SF talk on building the Fastly network.

Product releases

This quarter we unveiled our edge cloud network, which empowers businesses to deliver consistently secure, fast, and personalized digital experiences. We introduced three new services on our platform: the Fastly Image Optimizer, Load Balancer, and Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Image Optimizer

Fastly’s Image Optimizer dynamically transforms images at the edge of our network, closer to your end users, improving the customer experience while cutting infrastructure costs. You store one high-quality version of each image and the Fastly Image Optimizer automatically detects key details including device, browser, and geolocation to dynamically create image variations on-demand. Check out our Image Optimizer press release, datasheet, documentation, and demo site for more information, including how to get started.

Load Balancer

Fastly’s Layer 7 Load Balancer allows you to define content-aware routing decisions while ensuring instant convergence and failover. With Dynamic Server functionality you can programmatically add, delete, or modify your servers without having to version your VCL. You can use Fastly as a global server load balancer (GSLB) to route traffic across any geographically distributed infrastructure deployments and as a local server load balancer (LSLB) within each data center or cloud region. For more information about the Fastly Load Balancer, see our product page, press release, and documentation.

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Fastly’s WAF uses third-party rulesets from the OWASP Core Ruleset (3.0), commercial sources like Trustwave, and Fastly-generated rules. Our WAF only processes origin traffic, which provides latency benefits over traditional offerings that send all traffic through their WAF. And since we provide immediate visibility and instant configurations, you can modify rules in real-time to effectively mitigate attacks. More information about WAF can be found in our product page, press release, datasheet, and documentation.

Feature releases

VCL Snippets

VCL Snippets bridge the gap between the simplicity of using standard configuration objects, like headers and responses, from the web interface or API and the power of using full Custom VCL. You can now insert small chunks of VCL into your configuration without having to mix and match standard objects and Custom VCL which, when not done properly, can result in configuration issues. This gives you the power to easily customize your Fastly configurations while keeping changes in functionality small, localized, and easy to spot. Check out our documentation for more information on VCL Snippets.

File encryption for logging

In an ongoing effort to provide you with secure tools, we’re now offering log file encryption using PGP before they are written to disk, so your logs can only be read by those with access to your private key. This is supported for all our file based loggers: Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, FTP, Google Cloud Storage, and OpenStack. In addition, when logging to Amazon S3 you can also enable Server-Side Encryption. For more information about our log encryption capabilities, see our documentation.

Batch surrogate key purge

Efficient cache invalidation is an essential part of keeping your website fast. Using the Surrogate-Key header, you can selectively tag a group of objects with a key, then use they key to purge multiple pieces of content at once. We’ve now launched support for batching multiple surrogate key purges into one purge call via the API or web interface.

Web interface updates

We’re excited to announce a number of enhancements designed to improve your experience on the Fastly control panel:

• Our new homepage will help you see recent and important activity across your services.


• Improved functionality and flows of several features including check cache, managed conditions, connecting to origins over TLS, and more.


• A VCL inline editor lets you edit your VCL files directly rather than uploading and downloading them to an external tool. You can also use this for Custom VCL with the new VCL Snippets feature.


• Improved performance of the real-time dashboard graphs so you can rapidly glean insights from your data.

For information about these and other enhancements we’ve made to the web interface, check out our app release notes.

Video feature updates

Multi-DRM support

Fastly has released support for multi-DRM, giving you the ability to dynamically add DRM to videos that are packaged by our OTFP service. Our new multi-DRM feature includes support for Apple FairPlay, Google Widevine, Microsoft PlayReady, and Marlin DRM platforms, letting you protect your content across the most widely used platforms and devices. Contact sales@fastly.com to try out our multi-DRM support for yourself.

Content preconditioning for dynamic ad insertion

With our new content preconditioning support, Fastly can automatically prepare manifest files for ad insertion during packaging and caches the manifest in our edge cloud. This feature is designed to integrate into your existing ad workflows and help you get your content to market faster. Check out our documentation to learn more and contact sales@fastly.com to try out our content preconditioning support.

Community update

Events

Recent talks by Fastly folks:

• Andrew Betts on the power of the network at Altitude SF


• Artur Bergman on Future History at Velocity San Jose


• Joao Taveria on addressing IPv6 at RIPE


• Lisa Phillips on Incident Command at ChefConf


• Lorenzo Saino on Hashing on broken assumptions at NANOG 70


• Tom Daly on building the Fastly infrastructure at Altitude SF


• Tyler McMullen on the future of edge compute at Altitude SF


• Patrick Hamann on the first meaningful paint and CSS at CSSConf EU

Visit our events page to keep track of upcoming events where Fastly will be sponsoring and speaking.

Open source and non-profit projects we’re supporting

We proudly support open source and non-profit projects by donating our services. Here are some projects that have recently started using Fastly:

• Perimeter Institute


• Chakra Linux


• Ember.js


• CURL://


• JSDelivr

If you have an open source or non-profit project that could 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.