Q2'17 - Q3'17

Hi Fastly customers + friends,

In Q3, we were excited to launch some new products and features — including our Media Shield, which is already saving customers up to 75% on infrastructure costs — to help you make the most of our edge cloud network. Read on to learn what we’ve been up to last quarter.

Point of presence (POP) additions & enhancements

As Fastly grows, so do our customers. We’re always thinking about the latest and greatest strategic places for our POPs — Fastly’s network was built to take advantage of modern internet architecture, and Q3 additions and enhancements to our network will continue to help you scale delightful and consistent experiences.

We continued our North American expansion with new locations in Palo Alto (PAO), Burbank (BUR), Houston (IAH), Ashburn (DCA), and Atlanta (PDK) (POPs are named for their nearby airport code). We launched a new point of presence in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (GIG) which added a new metro market to our network map. We also deployed more capacity to our network by completely rebuilding our São Paulo (GRU), Dallas (DFW), Miami (MIA), and Hong Kong (HKG) POPs.

We’ve added additional cache capacity to our Chicago (ORD) and Tokyo (NRT) POPs to support our customers’ growth in those markets.

Network capacity growth

Our network team was busy in Q3 deploying massive network capacity upgrades (driven by the deployments above) across the Americas. We now have 17.5 Tbps of global connected capacity, which represents 27% growth in the last 3 months alone, and a whopping 50% since the beginning of April 2017. We joined the Japan Internet Exchange (JPIX) in Tokyo and Osaka to improve our interconnection capabilities in Japan and joined the IX.br in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.

Product releases

Media Shield LA

In Q3 we were excited to announce Fastly’s Media Shield, which helps customers like Brightcove optimize multi-CDN deployments while reducing origin infrastructure costs. Fastly’s Media Shield builds on existing origin shielding and request collapsing capabilities, extending these concepts to multi-CDN deployments outside of the Fastly network. You can configure existing CDNs to use Media Shield as the origin, then configure Media Shield to point to your infrastructure. Cache-misses from other CDNs get sent to Fastly’s Media Shield, where they have a higher likelihood of being served from cache. Customers have reported cost savings of up to 75% annually, along with performance and availability improvements. For more information about Media Shield, check out our press release and datasheet.

Feature releases

Role-based access control (RBAC) 1.0 LA

In an effort to give you more control over who can make changes to your services, we’ve introduced a new set of user management features that offer the ability to select per-service access controls and more securely manage permissions. Role-based access control (RBAC) 1.0 allows your teams to expand access for the management of Fastly configurations while ensuring that users only have access to the permissions they need. This level of control is particularly useful for large teams managing multiple services. For more information about RBAC, check out our documentation.

Google BigQuery logging LA

Building on our Google partnership, we’ve added the capability to log directly into Google's BigQuery data warehouse, which includes the ability to log nested data structures and support for template tables. Our BigQuery integration lets you analyze unlimited amounts of edge data to uncover actionable insights. For more information about how to set up Google BigQuery logging, see our press release and documentation.

DigitalOcean logging

We’re pleased to partner with DigitalOcean; we now support logging to Digital Ocean’s new object storage product, Spaces. With this custom, scalable log collection and storage solution, you can now benefit from fast, secure, smart asset delivery and transformation. For further reading, check out these guides on how to use Spaces as an origin for Fastly.

Image Optimizer: overlay support

Earlier this year, we launched the Fastly Image Optimizer to help our customers provide high-quality images at rapid speeds (making for better web experiences while cutting costs). We’ll continue to listen to your feedback and add new features accordingly, and are excited to announce our newest Image Optimizer feature: overlay support, which allows customers to layer one image on top of another. This is helpful for use cases like automatically adding a corporate identity to an image, image watermarking, image bursts, and more. Check out our documentation for more information about overlay support.

OTFP: fragmented MP4 (fMP4) support

Over the past year, Fastly has added a number of features to our On-the-Fly Packaging (OTFP) service to help you cut costs and streamline workflows associated with your VOD streaming services. We are thrilled to announce that Fastly’s OTFP service has added support for Apple’s fragmented MP4 (fMP4) file container format to represent HLS audio and video segments in iOS 10. FMP4 is also used as the base file container format for other HTTP streaming formats including Adobe HDS, Microsoft HSS, and MPEG-DASH. With fMP4 support, customers can now more easily unify delivery of their media content across all platforms and devices.