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Engineering
Building the WAF test harness
To help our customers secure their sites and applications — while continuing to give their users reliable online experiences — we’ve built a performant, highly configurable, and…
The evolution of Fastly’s Open Source and Nonprofit Program: supporting an ethical and open internet
Open source projects are the foundation of the internet; by sponsoring their important work, we support our vision for unfettered, scalable technical innovation. We’ve supported numerous…
The QA mindset: designing for reliability
Fastly’s engineering teams are smart and capable — they architect thoughtfully, write elegant code, and work carefully with incredible complexity and scale. So why would they (or anyone…
Building the Fastly WAF
In keeping with our security team’s vision for defending the modern web, we launched our Web Application Firewall (WAF) to help our customers secure their sites and applications while…
Deliberate practice in information security
Deliberate practice is the act of performing a set of tasks that are just slightly more difficult than what you’re used to, so you can get better at a specific activity and move from a…
How we moved our Historical Stats from MySQL to Bigtable with zero downtime
In an effort to move forward from early architecture that we were quickly outgrowing, we recently migrated our Historical Stats database from self-managed MySQL to Google Cloud Bigtable…
New York Media on surviving DDoS and building a better web
At Altitude 2016, New York Media’s CTO discussed surviving a massive DDoS and the steps they took to mitigate, gave us a peek inside their stack, and described how New York Media is building…
The New York Times on failure, risk, and prepping for the 2016 US presidential election
At Altitude NYC, The New York Times CTO Nick Rockwell gave us a peek inside The New York Times’ stack and culture (and how he’s redefined risk from both a corporate and engineering…
Creating 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…
Google Chrome’s Alex Russell on service workers, PWAs, and what’s next for mobile
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…
Building and scaling the Fastly network, part 2: balancing requests
In part 1, we discussed how Fastly started down the slippery slope of network software. Our previous experience with routing suggested that avoiding traditional network devices would not…
The 5 emotional stages of a DDoS attack
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…
