Fastly

Fastly is a leading edge cloud platform providing content delivery, security, and edge computing services engineered for modern applications that demand the highest levels of performance, programmability, and real-time observability. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Fastly serves thousands of enterprise customers worldwide including major media companies, e-commerce platforms, financial services firms, and technology companies.

Fastly's CDN is distinguished by its emphasis on programmability and real-time configuration propagation. Unlike traditional CDNs that require minutes or hours to propagate configuration changes globally, Fastly's changes propagate within seconds, enabling development teams to deploy and iterate on caching rules, routing logic, and security policies with the speed and agility required for continuous delivery workflows. Fastly's Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) provides a powerful, low-level programming model for controlling CDN behavior with fine-grained precision.

Fastly Compute provides a WebAssembly-based edge computing platform that enables developers to deploy code written in Rust, Go, JavaScript, or any language that compiles to WebAssembly to Fastly's global network with cold start times measured in microseconds. This performance characteristic makes Fastly Compute suitable for latency-sensitive edge functions including request authentication, response transformation, and A/B testing at the network edge.

Fastly's network design emphasizes point-of-presence consolidation over sheer quantity of locations, deploying high-capacity infrastructure in strategically chosen locations rather than the thousands of small nodes used by some competitors. This approach delivers high cache hit rates and predictable performance while simplifying network operations and ensuring that sufficient capacity exists at each location to absorb traffic spikes.

Fastly DDoS Protection and Next-Gen WAF provide edge security services that block malicious traffic before it reaches customer infrastructure, using signal intelligence from Fastly's network visibility to identify and mitigate threats in real time. Fastly's real-time log streaming delivers access logs to customer SIEM and analytics platforms within seconds of each request, enabling immediate visibility into traffic patterns and security events.