All blog posts
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CDN vs Caching: What is the Difference?
CDN and caching can get confused for one another. Learn the differences between CDN and caching to help decide what you should use for optimal web performance.
Fastly's 35th POP: Johannesburg + Network Upgrades
We’re pleased to announce our 35th point of presence (POP) located in Johannesburg, South Africa, and have grown our overall network capacity by 737.6% since 2014. We’ve deployed to Johannesburg (JNB) to increase performance for sites delivered by Fastly throughout southern Africa. With JNB online, Fastly now has [POPs on six continents](https://www.fastly.com/network-map). In this post, VP of Infrastructure Tom Daly discusses the improvements users in South Africa and neighboring areas will see, as well as the latest updates to our network in Auckland, Miami, Seattle, and Singapore.
Altitude NYC 2017 in review: videos and slides
Altitude NYC brought together Fastly engineers and industry leaders like The New York Times and Nordstromrack.com | Hautelook to discuss complex problems in security, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and more. Check out our recap and watch the session videos to learn about the vision behind Fastly, take a look under the hood of a DDoS attack, see what went down on election night at the NYT, and more.
IPv6 at Fastly
As Fastly CEO Artur Bergman has [said](https://www.fastly.com/blog/support-http2), “We will always insist that every component of the Fastly platform is fully integrated – we don't limit features to subsets of our network.” We take the time to fully integrate standardized protocols and technologies like [HTTP/2](https://www.fastly.com/blog/http2-now-general-availability) and IPv6 into our stack, and maintain the standards our customers have come to expect. Here’s our story of the evolution of IPv6 at Fastly — and how to implement it.
Originless & Cloud-Based Services with Fastly + Terraform
In a previous post, HashiCorp’s Seth Vargo introduced the Terraform infrastructure-as-code tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure. In this post, we’ll cover two cases using Terraform with Fastly: first we’ll create and manage an originless service and then we’ll create and manage a Google Compute Engine instance with a Fastly service in front of it.
Cache hit ratios at the edge: a performance study
In an earlier post, we discussed the meaning of cache hit ratio (CHR) and analyzed what the metric is and isn’t telling us, showing why we really need two different CHR metrics (CHR-edge and CHR-global) to fully understand how a CDN is serving your clients. In this post, we’ll analyze CHR-edge by way of a discussion about performance measurement via testing.
Fastly in support of the ACLU and Gavin Grimm
Today, we joined our customers, partners, and friends in filing an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief challenging the Gloucester County School Board’s policy related to gender identity. We believe building and fostering inclusive workplace environments is the right thing to do
The truth about cache hit ratios
Cache hit ratio is a common metric that evaluates a CDN's performance. Learn more about how to improve your cache hit ratio.
The Gaga Dive, and other Super Bowl phenomenon
The Super Bowl is one of the most-watched events in U.S. television, and presents a unique opportunity for companies to reach prospective customers through clever and well-placed advertising. This year, brands with ads drove an average increase in engagement of 437%, but that wasn’t the only engagement we observed — like last year’s big game, people signed off to watch the kickoff and halftime shows, and music streaming services also saw an increase in engagement as fans rushed to identify songs in commercials.
Standing in solidarity: our support of the amicus brief
Sunday night, Fastly joined 96 technology companies in filing an amicus brief (a “friend of the court” brief) in support of the lawsuit filed by the States of Washington and Minnesota to prevent certain portions of the President’s Executive Order 13769 on immigration from being enforced.
ACLU: exponential engagement following the U.S. election
In the months following the recent U.S. election, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has seen a sustained and rapid outpouring of support, reflected in record levels of giving and engagement with aclu.org. Following the first executive orders, we’ve seen exponential spikes in traffic to their website and a swell of donations. Here are the recent traffic patterns we’ve observed.
Introducing the Fastly savings calculator
Our CDN can cache more content than traditional solutions (static as well as rapidly changing, “event-driven” content), offloading traffic that would otherwise go to origin, allowing our customers to save on infrastructure costs. But just how big are these savings? To help answer this question at a glance, we recently launched our savings calculator, which offers quick insight into the savings you can expect as a result of improved cache hit ratios.
Fastly's POPs in Minneapolis, Montreal, and Madrid
We’re pleased to announce an alliteration of new POPs to the Fastly network: Minneapolis, Montreal, and Madrid. We’ve deployed these POPs to expand our reach throughout the Central United States, Canada, and southwestern Europe.
Announcing Altitude NYC
Altitude NYC brings a group of smart people together to solve complex problems in cloud infrastructure, security, DevOps, and more. You’ll hear from industry leaders like The New York Times, Spotify, Vogue, and Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook, and leave with real-world implementations you can take back to your team.
Engagement disparity: the inauguration & Women’s March
There was an uptick in traffic to media sites during the 45th president’s inauguration, but it didn’t compare to the election. Engagement during the weekend of January 20, 2017 in many ways mirrored the crowds — the Women’s March in DC had three times more people than the inauguration, and we saw a corresponding disparity in sustained online engagement. While traffic was high at the beginning of inauguration, it quickly levelled off. On the contrary, engagement during the Women’s March remained high into Saturday evening.
Chrome's Alex Russell on service workers, PWAs, and mobile | Fastly
At Altitude 2016, Software Engineer Alex Russell discussed the latest projects the “performance obsessed” Google Chrome team had underway. In this recap, we’ll take a look at how you can provide reliable offline experiences, how to best reach your users, and avoid the dreaded “Uncanny Valley.”
2016: a year in review
Since the founding of Fastly in 2011, we’ve continued to grow along with our customers at a rapid pace — as of 2017, we’ve grown to nearly 10 Tbps of global network capacity. 2016 was an eventful year; here’s a look at where we’ve been and where we’re going in 2017.
The top 10 moments of engagement in 2016
2016 was an eventful and emotional year, filled with surprises, cultural losses, tragedies, and the occasional glimmer of hope. Although we looked at 2016 as a whole, we found that the most instant and dramatic spikes in engagement were elicited by moments of global emotion — here’s a look at what we saw.
Anatomy of an IoT Botnet Attack
Understand how malware attacks happen to IoT devices and what companies can do to protect their devices from attacks.
Network expansion update: Frankfurt
We’re pleased to announce the addition of a second Frankfurt POP to Fastly’s network. In addition to providing more capacity and redundancy to our CDN in Central and Eastern Europe, the Frankfurt POP gives us the opportunity to leverage new switching technology to drive more 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports in our network.
