hoodoo


Beneath the surface of a beautiful brand website lies a complex tech stack that powers the experience. Hoodoo Digital is an agency that works at the intersection of creativity and technology to help brands deliver unique customer experiences that build trusted relationships. Hoodoo partners with Fastly to integrate edge compute technology into a multifaceted offering that gives clients both content security and performance at scale.

hoodoo.digital/

Industry: Professional Services, ISV

Location: Salt Lake City, UT

Customer since: 2019


Favorite features

Platform TLS

Fastly API

Load balancing

How Hoodoo optimizes AEM delivery with Fastly


Hoodoo brings simplicity to experience design and deployment

Hoodoo specializes in delivering customer experiences utilizing the Adobe Experience Cloud. The agency is an Adobe Platinum partner with a specialization in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). They provide consulting and implementation services as well as connectors that integrate AEM with several best-of-breed service offerings.


Fastly’s edge cloud platform is integral to Hoodoo’s AEM Cloud DevOps platform as a turnkey CDN solution for their hosted clients — implementing global content delivery is as easy as flipping a switch. For clients who are hosting their own solutions or using Adobe Managed Services, Hoodoo also provides a Fastly AEM connector that helps all customers of AEM unlock the capabilities of the Fastly platform and accelerate development cycles.


Edge computing helps clients improve speed and engagement


Hoodoo’s partnership with Fastly helps Hoodoo clients get the most out of edge compute technology. Many enterprise brand websites are either not using a CDN at all, or their CDN is poorly integrated with their digital experience platform. Fastly’s edge cloud platform is deeply integrated into Hoodoo’s AEM Cloud, which enables the agency to offer an optimized solution to its clients. As a result, Hoodoo has seen several important outcomes for clients:



  • Improved site performance — Fastly’s global network of POPs enable faster page load times across devices and regions. This drives customer engagement, which increases conversion rates for signups, sales, and other marketing goals.

  • Reliable uptime and availability — Using the Layer 7 load balancer enables Hoodoo to define content-aware routing decisions while ensuring instant convergence and failover, plus the ability to withstand traffic spikes and service disruption with advanced purging and caching, providing customers with an uninterrupted experience.

  • Built-in security — Security shouldn’t slow down your performance. With security controls built into the platform via the integration, Hoodoo can scale up rapidly without introducing latency.

  • Seamless real-time publishing — Hoodoo’s Fastly integration is content aware and uses Fastly’s surrogate keys to immediately update the global content cache for specific and related content in real-time triggered by AEM content publish events.










“We’re exploring more ways to integrate Fastly’s features into our platform, so that we can bring the full power of their innovative edge cloud platform to our clients using Adobe Experience Manager.”

Andy Wakefield


Co-founder

Automate TLS certificate provisioning and management at scale


Engaging customers is only half the battle. Brands need to build trust with customers over the long-term by providing a secure experience on their website or app. Hoodoo ensures that clients don’t have to compromise performance over security by using Platform TLS as part of their integrated edge computing solution.


One of Hoodoo’s clients presented a particularly tough challenge: Pacific Dental Services used AEM to manage a whopping 1,200 websites on behalf of dental offices, including multiple domains for marketing information and other services.


When Pacific Dental Services came to Hoodoo, not all of the dental websites were being delivered through HTTPS. The sites were hosted on an Apache server, and a few dozen certificates were causing performance issues. Adding urgency to the situation, Google was about to change its algorithm to downgrade insecure sites. Pacific Dental Services wanted to add TLS certificates across its portfolio as soon as possible, as well as automatically generate certificates for every new website going forward as they continue their growth. Because these sites were business-critical to dental offices, it was imperative that all maintained a high standard of performance.


Using Platform TLS and the Fastly API, the Hoodoo team built an end-to-end automation that allowed Pacific Dental Services to provision TLS at scale, including certificate and key management. The solution enabled Pacific Dental Services to move quickly and efficiently to bring all their current sites up-to-date with TLS security standards and easily manage the lifecycle of each one. Now, whenever the Komodo API provisions new certificates, they are automatically attached to domains and IP-to-service pinning allows the certs to take advantage of Fastly global infrastructure.










“Almost everything that we needed to do with Fastly, we’ve been able to do through the Fastly API, including configuring Platform TLS.”

Kem Elbrader


Co-Founder

What used to take Pacific Dental Services weeks now happens instantaneously and the end user experience is just as seamless. Pacific Dental Services customers see the green lock in their browser bar and can proceed with confidence while enjoying a fast, consistent experience.


For other clients, Hoodoo offers other Platform TLS configurations, including hostname mapping, as well as an integration that the team built with Let’s Encrypt. Fastly’s flexibility allows clients to configure their TLS set up as they wish and then go back to creating a great user experience rather than managing certificates.


“Platform TLS lets our clients easily manage security at scale without sacrificing performance.”

Andy Wakefield


Co-Founder

Improved security and performance boost clients' business goals


Whether Hoodoo’s clients use AEM Cloud or the Fastly AEM connector, edge computing clearly benefits the customer experience. Most clients see their site analytics showing improvements in availability and reliability, as well as faster page load times across devices and geographies. Clients also see a positive lift in their end users’ engagement, as they interact more, convert, and become repeat users. Ultimately, end users have the opportunity to enjoy the full brand experience as it was designed, and walk away with a favorable impression of a brand that they have come to appreciate and trust.


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