2021 and beyond: How our vision and roadmap will help you build for tomorrow, now

Video Transcript

Dana Wolf:

Hello. My name is Dana Wolf and I'm responsible for product and marketing at Fastly.

Nick Rockwell:

And I'm Nick Rockwell, Fastly's SVP of engineering.

Dana Wolf:

Today, we're going to walk you through Fastly's product vision, and a preview of the problems we will be solving this year on our roadmap. For many of you, Nick might be a familiar face despite his new role. He spoke at Altitude in 2017 when he was the CTO of the New York Times. I remember watching that video thinking, "Wow, it's an impressive engineering leader who isn't afraid to take these types of risks in the name of customer experience." And now I have the privilege of partnering with him every day to serve you, our customers. As a regular reader of the Times, the experience seems fairly flawless, but like so many of you, Nick knows firsthand what goes into creating these experiences.

Nick Rockwell:

There's so much you don't see going on behind every experience. There's always too much to do, and the minute you get great at something you're reaching for the next impossible experience. This balance between innovation, complexity, speed with risk, there's no formula and it takes a lot of work. This is innovation's dirty secret. The more you do the harder it gets. The more complexity and people you add, the more problems you face. You're forced to go slower and slower until it doesn't really feel like innovation anymore. You start to think, "Remember how much fun this used to do when we could go fast?"

Dana Wolf:

What Nick is describing is such a familiar story, and it's why this impossible challenge is core to Fastly's purpose. We believe our job is to enable you to build anything confidently and quickly. As Joshua was shared in his keynote, there's a set of tools that you need in order for that to happen. At a minimum, you must have real-time visibility, nuanced and ultimate control, high performance computing power, implicit trust and safety, the ability to handle scale in the face of any surge, and in the end, you must simply make sure that you deliver on your business goals.

Dana Wolf:

For the last 10 years, we've built tooling that's given you unrivaled visibility, control and scale. But I'm making a bolder claim now. Let me reiterate, we want to enable you to build anything. That means we must go further. It means we need to give you the primitives and the tools so you can build something on our Edge cloud platform before we even think of it. Our hypothesis is that for a more performant, more secure web experience, nearly everything can and should be built at the Edge. Now, while things like machine learning and proprietary data source access aren't yet Edge ready, most existing applications can easily become Edge native.

Nick Rockwell:

In past years. We've used this time with you to dive deep into the dozens and dozens of features that we've rolled out to enhance the platform. But today, we want to focus on just areas where we're making big shifts in our roadmap and in our direction overall. The shape of Fastly is changing so that we truly enable you to build anything in the Edge. In 2021, we'll expand and unify the investments that we made in compute and security, working in harmony to make the Edge a powerful place to build any digital project. And we'll double down on the superior performance that underpins everything we do. Let's start with Compute@Edge, the foundation of our serverless platform. Last year at altitude, we showed you Compute@Edge and we launched it into beta. Since then, we've worked with more than 60 customers and seen some amazing and creative solutions.

Nick Rockwell:

With that invaluable feedback and experience. We've iterated on the platform and we just announced that we're releasing Compute@Edge for limited availability. That's review some of the key new features. First as always, performance and scale. Compute@Edge is faster than ever, and still scales instantly close to your users across our entire Edge network. Next, observability. Stats in errors are now available in the user interface and via the API giving developers the visibility you need to build quickly. Language support is critical. We're excited to add support for assembly script alongside Rust, and to keep you in control. We launched Terraform support and a new CLI, so you can integrate and automate configuration of our infrastructure with code in a fast seamless developer experience.

Nick Rockwell:

So where are we going in 2021? For starters, we will continue to work towards general availability, maturing the platform, testing more use cases and improving performance. We're bringing state to the Edge with our key value store. We're giving developers even more advanced control over the CDN by extending the Compute@Edge cache control API. And we will continue to enable builders with additional languages and tooling, making it easier than ever to compute at Edge.

Dana Wolf:

Now we can give you all the computing power and control to bring your applications to the Edge, but there's a key imperative for building quickly and confidently, security. We believe that security can function as a core part of your workflow. And we are so excited to have recently joined forces with Signal Sciences and to share our exciting security roadmaps with you. For those of you who aren't familiar, Signal Sciences built a developer first, extremely powerful security platform that provides full protection from the latest web and API security threats. It's user-friendly, fully programmable and delivers the best visibility we've ever seen in any security product. Together with Signal Sciences, we'll now deliver a robust web application and API security portfolio, including runtime application, self protection, rate-limiting API protection, bot management, and next generation web application firewall. One of the areas that you're going to love about Signal Sciences is that they solve the web and API protection problem in one product, one user interface.

Dana Wolf:

In order to allow builders to move fast and with confidence, this type of approach to security is critical. Gone are the days where you have to configure five different products or work on combining reports from five different dashboards. Over the next several, we'll extend this philosophy while we take the best of both of our security offerings and combine them into a unified experience. We'll be taking Signal Sciences' modular architecture, and giving you the option to run it on our Edge cloud platform. Key components of this solution will be running on Compute@Edge, because as we shared, Compute@Edge is inherently more secure and performant. For those of you who want more help managing your risk and security profile, we're looking at expanding our managed security offerings

Nick Rockwell:

At the heart of our story is our network. And we continue to innovate and invest in unrivaled performance and scale. In 2021, we're rethinking the foundations of our network and setting the stage for the next phase of growth and capacity and speed. This benefits everything we do, but it's especially critical for our media customers. Our streaming customers are seeing explosive growth and they continue to challenge us, inspire us, and push us to new heights. This investment includes new pop designs, new hardware, optimizations, major innovations, and network automation and of course, flat out growth of the network. You can hear more about this innovation and investment later today from Archer and Catherine. We also heard from our streaming customers that maximizing origin offload to control egress cost is a top priority. So in 2021, we'll be releasing new product to greatly improve our performance in this respect. Last, we're bringing the power of Compute@Edge to bear on media solutions. In 2021, you'll see implementations of low-latency HLS, dynamic ad insertion, and other solutions for manipulating manifests for video. All built on the speed, efficiency and flexibility of Computed@Edge.

Dana Wolf:

For all the good serverless does to diminish operational challenges, it's undeniable that applications are getting more complex. Applications commonly include multiple microservices, run across multiple clouds and leverage more than one CDN. Stitching together an end to end view of performance across heterogeneous, and increasingly distributed systems can be difficult. Which is why I wanted to give you a quick preview into a newer area of investment for us, which is around observability. As you know, visibility is critical to building and delivering with confidence. With our approach to real time log streaming and stats, we place control, including privacy, into your hands. 100% of our enterprise customers use one or more of our 25 logging endpoints. As we've been working with you on both our compute and delivery products, you've asked us to invest more into our observability functionality. We're planning to build on top of our existing logging and stats functionality by delivering advanced analytics and alerting capabilities, giving you intelligence faster so you can take meaningful action.

Dana Wolf:

Our focus has always been to expose as much of the platform as possible. Kernel data, TCP settings, TLS, ciphers, you name it. We will continue building deep observability and tracing features into all of our product lines. This has been a year of exciting innovations and also challenging growth. As we take on big and important changes, one thing for Fastly remains the same. We will never stop working to build ahead of your needs. We will be relentless in our commitment to putting new tools in your innovator's toolkit and sharpening the tools we've already provided. We hope that you'll always hold us accountable and keep the conversations going. We really value our partnership with you. If you're interested in discussing a more detailed version of the roadmap with us, we have many eager product managers who'd love to chat. So feel free to email Nick and I, and we'll happily set up a followup.

Nick Rockwell:

If you're interested in any more details on any of our recently released features, please check out our release notes or explore our blog. Thank you for being with us here today.