Logic without latency: How ROLLER delivers frictionless guest experiences at global scale

The Challenge

ROLLER provides an all-in-one, cloud-based management platform for nearly 3,000 attractions in over 30 countries, from trampoline parks to museums. Their core mission is "customer obsession," which means removing friction from the guest experience at every touchpoint. This creates a complex technical challenge: their platform must simultaneously serve thousands of unique, customer-branded checkouts, handle high-volume ticket sales, and deliver a flawless, fast experience for guests globally.

This challenge manifests in two key areas. First, their clients (the venues) upload beautiful, high-resolution images for their checkout pages, but these large files can slow the critical purchase process to a crawl. Second, with a global footprint, ROLLER faces complex data routing needs. Standard geo-routing isn't enough when specific venues have data that must be sourced from a specific location, regardless of where the end-user is. All of this must be achieved while protecting the entire platform from attack - and without overburdening the infrastructure team with complex security rule management.

The Solution

ROLLER implemented Fastly’s integrated platform- including Delivery (CDN), Image Optimizer, and the Next-Gen WAF- to deliver a fast, secure, and intelligent platform for its clients. By leveraging Fastly, ROLLER can optimize performance at the edge, execute custom logic for complex routing, and automate threat detection, allowing their team to focus on innovation instead of maintenance. "We know that we're validating the leadership principles of customer obsession. It is fantastic, and that's what we want out of our technology stack," said Sean Fernandez, VP of Infrastructure and Security at ROLLER.

Instant Image Optimization delivers a 95% speed boost

The most immediate friction point for guests was the checkout experience, slowed by large, customer-uploaded images. Building an in-house optimization solution would have been a significant drain on resources. "Capacity and opportunity cost is always a big thing," said Fernandez. "We realized Fastly was a turnkey solution and a much faster migration to implement."

Fernandez added that Fastly Image Optimizer was easy to implement and the results were immediate. "On average we saw a 95% reduction in image sizes, which means the latency actually went from about 95 milliseconds to about five milliseconds, which was kind of phenomenal," Fernandez noted. This quick change delivered a vastly quicker checkout, directly supporting ROLLER's customer obsession principle.

Custom logic at the edge solves complex global routing

As a global platform, ROLLER’s routing needs were more complex than a standard CDN could handle. "You want to get to the closest point, so there's always geo location routing. But that's not good enough when you have customers that have specific data at specific locations, regardless of where they are globally," explained Fernandez. "You want that CDN, but you also want to get to the source data slightly differently."

ROLLER uses Fastly to solve this. They can now place "a bit of that logic at the edge" to precisely control how and where traffic is routed, ensuring both speed and compliance with their specific data-sourcing needs. "It feels like Fastly was one of the first companies to deliver on something with compute at the edge," said Fernandez.

Intelligent WAF protects venues without manual rule-tuning

With thousands of clients processing payments, security is paramount, but traditional WAFs created a high-maintenance burden. "If you've ever played with a WAF system, you have to write your own rules, and they're very specific," Fernandez said. "The Fastly system is fantastic for WAF. You don't have to hand-carve your own rules."

The Fastly Next-Gen WAF provides intelligent, automated protection that saves his team valuable time. "It understands what the different types of attacks look like, and it can learn what is actually good behavior versus not." This move to an automated, intelligent security posture was a key factor in ROLLER's decision to move more of their systems to Fastly.

Key takeaway

ROLLER’s all-in-one platform is built on removing friction, not just for guests but for their own internal teams. By leveraging Fastly's integrated platform, ROLLER gets extreme performance (95ms to 5ms latency on images), powerful architectural control (custom logic at the edge), and automated, intelligent security (Next-Gen WAF). This allows their infrastructure team to stop being a bottleneck and start being a key enabler of "customer obsession" on a global scale.