All blog posts

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Engagement disparity: the inauguration & Women’s March

Tyler McMullen

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.

Observability

Chrome's Alex Russell on service workers, PWAs, and mobile | Fastly

Anna MacLachlan

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.”

Performance
Engineering

2016: a year in review

Artur Bergman

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

Tyler McMullen

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.

Observability

Anatomy of an IoT Botnet Attack

Jose Nazario, PhD

Understand how malware attacks happen to IoT devices and what companies can do to protect their devices from attacks.

Security
Compute

Network expansion update: Frankfurt

Tom Daly

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.

Performance
+ 3 more

Scaling Fastly Network: Balancing Requests | Fastly

João Taveira Araújo, Lorenzo Saino, + 1 more

Our previous post detailed how Fastly started down the slippery slope of network software. By implementing a distributed routing system on commodity switches, we were able to maintain complete control over how we forward packets at a fraction of the cost imposed by conventional networking wisdom.

Engineering
+ 3 more

Real-time insights: ACLU + Giving Tuesday 2016

Anna MacLachlan

The Tuesday after Thanksgiving marks one of the biggest days of the year for donation sites, and giving numbers hit record highs this year. We’ve collaborated with the ACLU to share some hope-inspiring donation data.

Observability

HTTP/2 is now in General Availability

Jason Evans

We’re pleased to announce that HTTP/2 is now in General Availability. Our implementation of the HTTP/2 protocol supports all of the standard protocol features, which will deliver a host of benefits to our customers.

Product

Real-time insights: holiday traffic

Tyler McMullen

Our CDN gives us a unique, real-time view of aggregated traffic patterns on the web. With the 2016 holiday shopping season upon us, we took a look at how shoppers have engaged with ecommerce sites — as expected, we saw a 207% increase in traffic as compared to normal at 11 AM ET on Black Friday. But, traffic spikes weren’t isolated to our ecommerce customers. We also saw increased engagement with charity donation sites as well as food-related sites.

Observability

Redesigning the Fastly control panel

Jessica Allen, Brian Santiago

In July, we introduced the redesigned Fastly control panel, which our customers rely on to manage and control their Fastly services. As UX designers, we help make using the control panel the best experience possible by fostering a culture of user empathy and design collaboration throughout our entire organization. In this post, we’ll discuss design at Fastly, illustrating with examples from the redesign of our new control panel.

Product

Secure comms & Fastly advisories reminder | Fastly

Maarten Van Horenbeeck

We publish our security advisories to address vulnerabilities discovered on our own platform, as well as significant security vulnerabilities that affect the wider internet community.

Security

The 5 emotional stages of a DDoS attack

Artur Bergman

It’s emotionally damaging to be the victim of a DDoS, to say the least. The technological consequences of an unmitigated DDoS attack can cripple businesses, but the emotional impacts are often ignored. CEO Artur Bergman discusses the five emotional stages of a DDoS attack (and how to mitigate).

Engineering

Solving VCL auth & feature flags at the edge | Fastly

Rogier Mulhuijzen, Anna MacLachlan

In “How to solve anything” parts 1 and 2, we outlined how to use Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) to address some of your more challenging problems. In this post, we’ll discuss how Andrew Betts of the Financial Times uses advanced VCL to securely cache and serve authenticated and authorized content, and set up feature flags.

Engineering

Election day 2016

Tyler McMullen

Although online engagement increases with every election, the 2016 presidential election saw an especially dramatic boost. As surprising polling results rolled in across the nation, voters and global observers turned to trusted media sites to follow the politically polarizing race — here are some of the traffic patterns we observed.

Observability

A step towards better Web API authentication

Toru Maesaka

The Fastly API is an integral part of our CDN — using our APIs, customers are able to instantly reflect configuration changes, purge content, and perform anything that is available on the Fastly control panel from within their application. In this post, Toru discusses our new API authentication method, API tokens.

Engineering
+ 3 more

The evolution of election technology

Elaine Greenberg, Anna MacLachlan

With more and more ways for candidates to engage with voters online, campaigns face a unique set of technical challenges, many of which weren’t present during the last presidential election. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the technical challenges candidates’ engineering teams face in 2016, as well as some of the strategies we’ve seen.

Announcing Fastly Managed CDN

Artur Bergman

Today, we’re pleased to announce general availability of the Fastly Managed CDN, a custom-built solution for high-traffic, content-driven businesses that need the benefits of a DIY content delivery solution without dedicating significant internal budget and resources to building their own.

Product

A/B testing at the edge

Chris Jackel

A/B testing is valuable, aggravating, and everyone has an opinion on the best way to do it. At Fastly, we provide a set of tools to help enable experiments you can integrate into your own analytics.

Performance
+ 2 more

Major moments from the third and final presidential debate

Tyler McMullen

This election has garnered an unprecedented amount of attention, and while traffic to media sites increased during the third debate, major moments of engagement (spikes) decreased by 83% as compared to the first debate. Here are some of the traffic patterns we saw.

Observability