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Leveraging your CDN to cache "uncacheable" content
As I've written about before, there is a growing class of content called “event-driven content” that may appear dynamic, but isn’t. Even though caching this type of content is more difficult, it’s possible to cache it with the right tools — although you might have been told otherwise. In doing so, you can leverage the power of caching in new ways and reap the benefits that come along with it.
The Rise of Event-Driven Content
In this post and going forward, we’re going to take a step back, talk about the different types of content our customers are dealing with the most, and discuss how cacheable or uncacheable they are.
Reusing backend connections to increase performance
Reusing connections between your Varnish instance and your backends (origins) is a good idea for multiple reasons. If your Varnish is on the same network as your backends and you're doing low volume traffic, you can stop reading, because a) the difference will probably be negligible, and b) you're probably already reusing backend connections.
Fastly’s edge modules that will power your ecommerce site
Ecommerce companies face challenges that a content delivery network built on Varnish can help address. To stay competitive and relevant, ecommerce websites and applications need to be able to target specific content to specific users (based on location, language, or browsing preferences), tailor content delivery depending on which device a consumer is using, and prioritize shoppers based on actions they’ve taken within a site or app.
Tips for successfully migrating to Fastly
Moving to a new content delivery network (CDN) can seem daunting from an operational standpoint, and it’s important to ensure your CDN is set up correctly before you start migrating all your traffic. In this post, I’ll outline a few steps you can take to experience a smooth migration process to Fastly.
Addressing TLS Revocation and OCSP Challenges
Rotation, expiration, and revocation of secrets are all important concerns that require careful and difficult up-front design. Transport Layer Security (TLS), the protocol underlying secure web traffic (HTTPS), is one of the cryptographic systems with the largest deployment and day-to-day use, and serves as a good case study for all of the proceeding concerns. In this post, I’ll discuss how revocation is addressed in TLS, and how it relates to both performance and security.
Understanding Your End User with Performance Monitoring
End users are consumers who will use a service, and monitoring their performance is often overlooked. See how monitoring performance of end users improves user experience.
The benefits of using Varnish
Varnish is an open source web accelerator that is designed for high-performance content delivery. Learn more about what Varnish is and how Fastly's varnish can help accelerate your content.
Introducing Soft Purge
Today, we’re excited to announce Soft Purge, a new purging feature that allows you to easily mark content as outdated (stale) instead of permanently deleting it from Fastly’s caches. With Soft Purge, you have the same real-time purging options that you get with Instant Purge: purge by URL or by surrogate key.
March 19 OpenSSL Security Advisory
Fastly has evaluated each of these vulnerabilities and found that only one moderate-severity bug affects our configuration. We are currently testing the patch and coordinating a global release of the updated software across Fastly’s network. We anticipate no customer impact or configuration changes.
Cache hit issues? Fix it | Fastly.
The cache hit ratio (or hit ratio for short) is the ratio of hits to cacheable requests (hits and misses combined). There's also cache coverage, the ratio of cacheable requests to all requests (cacheable requests and passes). In most cases, you'll want both to be as high as possible, since misses and passes cause load on your origins, and are slower than cache hits.
10 questions to ask when evaluating CDNs
In my last blog post, I discussed why you should use a content delivery network. But after you’ve decided to start using a CDN, you’ll need to pick out the right CDN for your business.
TLS at the edge and server-side security
We’re huge fans of Transport Layer Security (TLS) at Fastly. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we do encryption at the edge, which can also serve as overall best practices for handling server-side TLS.
Fastly support training & lessons learned | Fastly
This article dives into our support team's training processes and explains how our lessons learned can help your support team grow.
What Is a CDN and Why You Should Use One
A content delivery network (CDN) is a way to deliver content from your website or mobile application to people more quickly and efficiently, based on their geographic location.
How our solid-state drives result in cost savings for customers
Solid-State Drives (SSDs) are semiconductor-based storage devices that save persistent data by using NAND flash memory. See how Fastly manages caches with SSDs and how you can save.
Fastly's support building, part 3 | Fastly
At Fastly, we've made some key decisions about how to operate and structure our support team in a way that allows us to deliver quality at scale. Some of the lessons we learned are more specific to issues encountered as we grew, but most can be applied to any support or customer-facing team.
Getting an A in security: SHA-2 migration and disabling RC4
As many of you know, TLS best practices have changed a lot in the past two years. Recently, Fastly has changed how we configure TLS to make it even more secure. This includes migrating our TLS certificates from SHA-1 to SHA-2 and disabling RC4 for all our services.
Boost Cache Efficiency with Origin Log Analysis
If you want to increase the efficiency of your Varnish (or Fastly) cache, you need to figure out what traffic is not cached. By definition, any traffic that reaches your origin is not cached, and thus worthy of investigation.
How Fastly builds support, part 2: The customer experience
What customers encounter when evaluating and onboarding with Fastly isn't arbitrary. It's an experience that we've intentionally crafted. This post will discuss what customers experience, and what we have in place to make sure it happens every time, for every customer.
