A CDN not only shields your origin from spikes in traffic, but it also ensures speedy delivery of content. This helps you meet your users’ expectations when they visit your site, whether that’s reading the latest news on the royal baby or purchasing a coveted item during a flash sale. To do this well, your CDN needs to have a few key qualities, including prioritizing site uptime and performance, the ability to make updates and serve content in real time, and up-to-the-second visibility into logs and performance analytics. Below, Fastly’s customers discuss how our CDN has helped them during high-traffic events.

If you follow the security news cycle, you may have seen recent discussions about Google detecting a Certificate Authority (CA) in China improperly issuing certificates capable of transparently (that is, without warning) imitating Google TLS-protected websites. As part of the subsequent investigation, Google removed the implicated CA from the list of trusted CAs and indicated that in order for the CA to be considered for re-inclusion, they would have to implement a system known as Certificate Transparency (CT). Below, I’ll outline the basics of CT and how it relates to this and other CA-related incidents in recent history.

In a previous post, I discussed the benefits of Fastly edge modules. Among those listed is GeoIP / Geography Detection, which is useful for any company (especially those in ecommerce, hospitality/travel, and media) that needs to segment content delivery based on geographic location.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article dives into our support team's training processes and explains how our lessons learned can help your support team grow.

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.