In large-scale ecommerce environments, page performance has a direct and measurable impact on customer behavior. Even small increases in latency can affect conversion rates and repeat customer engagement – especially on mobile. While traditional Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) excel at caching static assets like images and CSS, a major challenge has always remained: how to deliver dynamic, personalized, and time-sensitive content without slowing down the user experience.
Fastly is collaborating with Google Cloud to help solve this challenge. By combining Fastly's edge cloud platform with Google Cloud’s robust infrastructure, retailers can now cache even the most dynamic content, leading to a faster, more resilient, and dramatically more cost-effective digital storefront.
The Business Value: Why Speed Matters
Even small improvements in mobile performance can have a meaningful impact on conversions. For a major retailer, this isn't just a marginal gain – it can translate to millions of dollars in potential revenue.
Fastly on Google Cloud helps address these challenges in a few ways:
Improving User Experience (UX): Serving content from the closest possible point to the user can drastically reduce latency and provide an instant, seamless browsing experience.
Increasing Conversion Rates: Faster page loads are consistently correlated with lower cart abandonment and higher checkout completion rates.
Reducing TCO (Total Cost of Ownership): By offloading requests from the backend, you can significantly reduce the load on your Google Cloud infrastructure (like Google Compute Engine or Google Kubernetes Engine), leading to major savings.
Enhancing Scalability: The joint solution can easily handle massive traffic spikes, such as during Black Friday or major product launches, without overwhelming your origin servers.
The Technical Architecture: Making Dynamic Content "Static"
A key technique for caching dynamic ecommerce content is the use of Surrogate Keys combined with Fastly’s Instant Purge.
Instead of relying on a simple, time-based cache expiration, you tag content with unique Surrogate Keys. When a change occurs, like a price update, you would purge all content with that specific key across the entire Fastly network. This purge takes mere milliseconds (<150ms regional mean purge time*), helping to ensure global freshness without sacrificing edge speed.
A common implementation pattern looks like this:
Request Hits the Edge: A user requests a product page that includes a dynamic price and inventory count. The request first hits the Fastly edge node.
Instant Delivery: If the content is in the cache and valid, Fastly serves the page immediately.
Backend Update: A product manager updates the price in the backend database.
Purge Trigger: This database update triggers a Google Cloud Function (or a Cloud Run service) via a Pub/Sub event.
Millisecond Purge: The Cloud Function sends a purge request to the Fastly API, instructing it to invalidate the surrogate key.
Refresh: Within milliseconds, all globally cached instances of that page are purged. The next user request will go to the Google Cloud origin, fetch the new data, and then be re-cached at the edge for everyone else.
This architecture helps ensure that content is always fresh, without sacrificing the immense speed and scalability of edge caching.
How Ecommerce Teams Can Benefit from Fastly’s Collaboration with Google Cloud
For ecommerce teams, performance and freshness tend to become pain points as traffic grows – especially during promotions, sales, or seasonal peaks. Fastly can be used alongside Google Cloud to help address those issues without major changes to existing applications.
Here’s where customers typically see impact:
1. Faster performance at a global scale
Static assets like images, CSS, and JavaScript are served from Fastly’s edge, closer to users around the world.
Requests that need to reach Google Cloud origins can take advantage of private network connectivity, helping reduce latency and egress.
Origin Shield helps limit backend load by collapsing cache misses, which is especially useful during traffic spikes.
2. Fresh content without giving up caching
Dynamic pages stay cacheable, without long delays when inventory or pricing changes.
When backend data changes, affected content can be invalidated and re-cached with fresh data from Google Cloud.
Lightweight personalization or messaging can be handled at the edge using Fastly Compute.
3. Security and visibility at the edge
Fastly’s Next-Gen WAF helps block unwanted traffic before it reaches Google Cloud workloads.
Real-time log streaming into Google Cloud Storage or Google Cloud’s BigQuery autonomous data to AI platform makes it easier to analyze traffic, security events, and user behavior in one place.
A Winning Combination for Modern Ecommerce
Fastly’s collaboration with Google Cloud provides a practical approach to addressing common performance and scalability challenges in modern ecommerce platforms. By leveraging Fastly's instant purge and intelligent caching alongside Google Cloud's scalable compute and data services, retailers can build a truly high-performance, resilient, and cost-effective digital experience that keeps customers coming back.
To learn more, explore how Fastly and Google Cloud work together to support high-performance ecommerce workloads.
* <150ms regional mean purge time to clear cached content, re-confirmed on December 31, 2025
Forward-looking statements
This article contains “forward-looking” statements that are based on Fastly’s beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to Fastly on the date of this article. Forward-looking statements may involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause its actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. These statements include, but are not limited to, those regarding Fastly on Google Cloud's ability to improve user experience, increase conversion rates, reduce total cost of ownership, or enhance scalability; address major changes to existing applications; improve performance; block unwanted traffic; or analyze traffic, security events, and user events. Except as required by law, Fastly assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future. Important factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially are detailed from time to time in the reports Fastly files with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), including in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2025. Additional information will also be set forth in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on Fastly’s website and are available from Fastly without charge.