Introducing Fastly Academy: on-demand learning at your fingertips

We’re excited to announce that Fastly Academy, our new on-demand learning center, is now live with lessons for learners of all levels. Fastly Academy joins our Developer Hub and Documentation Center as an additional resource to help you work — and expand your skills — the way that fits you best. 

There’s a lot of content to explore. Read on to see how you get started in three steps.

1. Create your account

First thing first: create your Fastly Academy account using your business email address (you can also link a secondary email address, like the one you use for your Fastly developer account). You’ll use this account to log in, confirm course registrations and completions via email, and track your learning progress in your profile. Find your profile in the top right corner of any page in the Fastly Academy to update your information or view your progress. 

Now that you’re in, watch the “Get Started” video on the Fastly Academy homepage for an overview of available content, tips for navigating courses, and available support resources from our Customer Enablement Team. 

2. Get your feet wet 

Especially if you’re new to Fastly or just getting started with content delivery, web application security, or edge computing, make the Fastly Basecamp page your first stop. 

In this section, you’ll find the foundations you need before diving into more specialized and advanced coursework. For example, the “Foundations of the Web” series provides the basics of the web, content delivery, and our technology. If you’re new to Fastly, create your developer account, then be sure to visit our “Basics of Account Management” to learn the ins and outs of managing it. 

3. Explore the content

We’ve broken lessons up to align with our main product areas of focus — deliver, secure, and compute. Each section will give you opportunities to become familiar with our offerings and how to use them. 

Deliver
Here you’ll find training on our caching and content delivery capabilities to help you create fast, dynamic digital experiences for your end users. Explore techniques and capabilities that optimize a request’s route to your origin; get in-depth instruction on Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) subroutines; and master the modification and administration of your service configurations.  

Secure
With two areas of focus — network and application security — this section offers a broad range of training content on our award-winning security solutions. You’ll find lessons on TLS encryption, WAF architecture, rule configurations, administration, and more.  

Compute
Compute@Edge is our serverless compute platform, recently named a “Leader” in edge compute tools by Forrester. In this section, you’ll find lessons on the basics of how it works, its features, and how you can get started developing. 

Advantages of building at the edge can include reducing infrastructure cost, scaling instantly, and enhancing the most latency-sensitive use cases. Of particular interest is the ability to scale geographically without investing in hardware or infrastructure. We’ll be expanding this section over time to dig into all of this and more.

More to come

Over time, you’ll see changes to our training courses to include interactive, hands-on activities using resources like virtual environments and Fastly Fiddle. And if you need help along the way, the Customer Enablement team is here for you. 

Finally, please complete the surveys at the end of each course to provide your feedback, suggestions for improvement, and ideas on how we can provide even more impactful learning experiences for you. We can’t wait to see what you build.