Gannett reduces bandwidth usage by 50% with Fastly security solutions

The Challenge

For news organizations like Gannett, big events can be a double-edged sword. A surge in traffic may lead to an increase in bots and malicious actors, and that leads to higher costs. This was definitely the case during the 2024 US elections. Bandwidth usage steadily crept up, demanding more resources and putting sites at higher risk of outages. Gannett needed solutions to ensure it could serve news to real customers while controlling bots and bad actors—a tricky balance.

The Solution

Gannett delivers breaking news to editorial desks across the country using a content management system that runs on Google Cloud and it publishes that news to readers through its websites, which run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The site reliability team at Gannett | USA TODAY Network is charged with delivering the most reliable platform to both Gannett's internal team and its customers. Yanyan Ni, a principal engineer in the company's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, said Fastly's NextGen WAF and Bot Management have become essential tools for meeting this objective. "Fastly's security solutions greatly protect us from malicious attacks and also protect our origin from excessive traffic, without impacting customer experience." Ni said.

Protecting resources saves money, maintains reliability

The difference in resource usage before and after implementing Fastly solutions was apparent immediately. Leading up to the elections, Ni observed that malicious traffic was aggressively targeting and scraping our web content, which can take a huge toll on bandwidth usage. "We were experiencing an increase in bandwidth usage as the election was approaching, but as soon as we deployed the NextGen WAF and Bot Management, overall bandwidth usage decreased. (see graph fr to illustrate) At the same time, the number of requests remained stable, which signals we efficiently blocked and rate limited harmful bots from abusing our sites" Ni said.

By deploying Fastly’s solutions, overall bandwidth usage dropped more than 50% compared to the peak level, and cloud storage is at only 20% of peak usage. "The reductions we realized from using Fastly security tools definitely led to cost savings during an election year," said Ni.

User-friendly tools reduce effort and accelerate results

At Gannett, the SRE team is responsible for developing deployment methods for security tools, including both security policy updates and production deployments, as needed. Ni said her team appreciates that with Fastly, their security tools don't block or delay regular deployments. "Also, the Fastly codebase integrates so well with GitHub, which allows us to deploy things very efficiently," Ni said.

To ensure problem-free rollouts, the SRE team uses a lower environment to test changes to Next Gen WAF rules, then gradually rolls the rules out on the production site. "This is another good feature of the Next Gen WAF," said Ni. "We can start at about 40 or 50% and get feedback before going 100%, so we can be sure it won't impact overall services."

Gannett also makes use of Next Gen WAF logs on the NextGen WAF console to confirm that rules are working properly. "The NextGen WAF logs are really good—the tools are so user-friendly, which makes it easier to be sure a rule works perfectly before you apply it overall," Ni said.

A single platform simplifies problem solving

Gannett uses Fastly's CDN, application security solutions, and Compute as one integrated platform, which also helps preserve resources and streamline the team's efforts. "Having different functionalities built on top of the one platform makes it easy for us to manage," said Yi, "and building our API gateway system on top of Fastly CDN services has saved us a lot of money." Ni also appreciates the observability gained, especially since Fastly implemented the Observability Dashboard. "Everything is on one single console, so troubleshooting is easy."

Using a complete Fastly platform also enables more stakeholders to participate. "With the NextGen WAF, not just the security team, but the SRE team and our front-end team of developers can all be involved in creating the rules and using the tools," Ni said.

Empowering developers and boosting productivity

"Fastly is very good at letting developers participate, especially compared to our previous CDN provider" said Ni. Gannett can integrate Fastly solutions in its CI/CD pipelines, so developers and engineers are free to work independently and flexibly and deploy efficiently. As the company's teams increase their use of Compute, developers can create services to run on the edge, and do it using any language that compiles to WebAssembly, like Rust, JavaScript, or Go. "That's a powerful advantage," said Ni.

While developer freedom is a big plus for Gannett, Ni appreciates the support from Fastly as well: "Working with Fastly is a great experience. They respond very efficiently—if we have an urgent issue, they jump up instantly to help us fix it." Fastly's developer focus also means that new features are designed with developers' needs in mind. "I would strongly recommend Fastly to other developers," Ni said.

Key takeaway

Security and great user experience don’t have to be in opposition. By leveraging Fastly’s Edge Cloud Platform—including Next-Gen WAF and Bot Management—Gannett ensured both during a high-traffic election season, demonstrating the power of a scalable, secure platform.

"We have had a great experience with Fastly," said Ni. "There are a lot of demands on our team, and Fastly has really helped us be prepared."