Overview
Welcome to the Fastly docs. Here we present a series of articles, tutorials, and references to help you get the most out of using Fastly for your site, service, or application.
The docs are split into three top level categories:
- Overview - A basic overview to help acquaint you with Fastly.
- Tutorials - An extensive list of tutorials to help you perform specific tasks.
- API Reference - Full reference to the Fastly API.
Without further ado, let's get you acquainted with the system! In the next section we'll explain what Fastly does and how best to use it with your site.
How Fastly works
In a nutshell, Fastly works by storing your website's content on servers all over the world and speedily delivering that content to your users.
We track the geo-location of each user and make sure they are connecting to server that is closest to them. This makes your site faster by reducing the time spent waiting for data to be sent from the server to the user.
We also give you full control over when and how we store content from your servers. You can easily set a Time To Live (TTL) for any path on your site and instantly invalidate or Purge any path on the your site using our Purge API.
By using these tools you may only have to generate pages for the site once for many millions of page views. This saves time for your users and costs on your server bills.
Advanced features
Fastly also provides many advanced features that will help you monitor how your data is being accessed and customize how content is delivered.
Instant Purging allows you to have fine grained control over when and how content is updated for your users. Gone are the days of waiting up to 24 hours to change data at the edge, with fastly you can update you data when you want and as often as you want.
With Real Time Analytics you always have a top level view of your network and how your site is performing. Every second we compile the relevant data about all of your traffic into an easy-to-read report.
Using Conditions you can change how requests are routed, what headers to send, and how content is cached.
We make it easy to setup Health Checks that monitor the status of one or many of your backend servers. This way if anything goes wrong with your servers you will know about it immediately.
System Logs can be quickly and easily configured to send information from your servers anywhere and in the format you want.
Your entire configuration can even be handled programmatically via the Fastly API. This allows you to write scripts to handle basic configuration tasks and even create your own administrative views (so they can be directly coupled with your existing admin software).
Getting started
If you are excited to begin using Fastly but don't know where to begin then check out our Tutorials section. You can learn everything from how to setup your first service to configuring advanced features for your site.
If you don't have an account then you should sign up now. Feel free to choose the developer plan so you can test how fastly works on you site.
If you are having problems check out the Getting Started tutorial or send us a message to support@fastly.com.