Working with CDN services

Once you create a CDN service, you can edit and activate new versions of your Fastly services that include refinements and updates to your configurations. The Fastly control panel also allows you to do other things with existing Fastly services, like compare them to each other, deactivate or reactivate them, and delete them.

Before you begin

Before you create your first Fastly service, be sure you understand how services and versions work and service creation limits. You'll also need to understand the Fastly web interface controls before using them to work with your Fastly services.

Creating a new CDN service

You can create a new CDN service via the Fastly control panel. Use the steps below to quickly create a CDN service that uses standard defaults common to many customers.

To create a new service:

1. Log in to the Fastly control panel.

2. Click Create service at the top right of the page, just below the primary navigation controls.

3. In the Service name field, enter a descriptive name for your service (e.g., My Example Website Service).

4. In the Domain field, enter the name of the domain you want Fastly to use to route requests to. Our guide to working with domains provides additional details.

5. In the Host field, enter the name of the host you plan to use as the backend or origin for your site. Our guide to working with hosts provides additional details.

6. Review the Recommended defaults. These are settings we recommend you enable for your service. You can disable them by clicking the appropriate setting switch to Off.

   • Compression - Brotli and Gzip: automatically compresses content to help reduce the size of your assets, improving performance and reducing bandwidth. Defaults to Brotli when available, otherwise uses Gzip.

   • HTTP/3: uses HTTP/3 for end user connections, where supported, for improved speed, security, and reliability.

   • Force TLS & HSTS: enables the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) security enhancement specification through Fastly and forces modern web browsers to communicate only via the TLS protocol. If you leave this default setting enabled, be sure to create a TLS certificate for use with your domains.

   • TLS Certificate - Fastly-managed: creates a TLS certificate using Certainly, Fastly's publicly-trusted certification authority.

     HINT: All accounts include up to five Fastly-managed Certainly certificates for free. Additional certificates incur an additional fee.

   • DDoS protection - Logging mode: enables automatic detection against common Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. When enabled, DDoS Protection immediately begins logging potential attack traffic for observation without mitigation. If you want to block potential attack traffic, you can adjust the setting after you create your service.

     HINT: If DDoS protection is not already purchased for your account, you have the option to purchase it by enabling this setting. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the billing details.

   • Next-Gen WAF: enables the Next-Gen WAF using the Edge WAF deployment method. Requires a workspace (site) to enable. If you have multiple workspaces, use the menu to select a workspace. By default, the Next-Gen WAF is configured to inspect 100% of traffic. You can adjust this setting after you create your service.

7. Finally, do one of the following to finish creating your service:

   • Click Activate to create your service and activate it. A new version of your service will be created and locked. You'll need to clone the service version to make additional edits to your service configurations.
   • Click Save draft to create your service in a draft state. You can continue editing your service configurations until you're ready to activate

8. Test your service configurations by opening https://www.example.com.global.prod.fastly.net in a new browser window, replacing www.example.com with your own website's domain name. Your website should appear, though it may take up to 60 seconds for new configuration settings to take effect. You can continue to explore various configuration settings for as long as you like before starting to serve traffic.

Configuring DNS settings to route traffic to Fastly

If you entered a domain and elected to have Fastly create a TLS certificate when you created your service, we'll provide you with the DNS record values you'll need to configure to route traffic to Fastly. You can also select your domain provider from the menu to get a link to detailed instructions for setting up DNS records on the provider's website.

By configuring your DNS records, you accomplish a few things:

• You prove that you are the owner of the domain.
• You authorize Fastly to deliver your site to people visiting your domain name.
• You enable traffic to be delivered via HTTPS.

Once you've set up your DNS records, click I'm done, check my domain. Fastly will verify your DNS settings, which typically takes a few minutes. Fastly will also issue your TLS certificate, if you elected to do so.

Click Finish to proceed. If you're haven't already activated your service, click Activate service to do so now. Or, click View service configuration to enter the service configuration, where you can continue to customize how your traffic is served by Fastly.

About the Service summary and Service configuration tabs

After you create your service, you'll see two tabs: the Service summary tab and the Service configuration tab.

The Service summary tab lets you review general service details including the event log, duplicate (clone) service versions so you can edit them, and purge content. The Service summary tab also allows you to compare differences between two configuration versions.

The Service configuration tab contains the main controls for editing your service configurations. Specifically, you can:

• manage the domains used to route requests to a CDN service
• manage the hosts used as backends for a site and how they should be accessed
• manage the health checks that monitor backend hosts
• enable certain Fastly products for the service, if you are assigned the role of superuser or engineer. Note that this will result in changes to your monthly bill.
• manage various request and cache settings, headers, and responses that control how Fastly caches and serves content for a CDN service
• specify how logging should be performed and where server logs should be sent
• create custom Varnish configuration language (VCL) files
• specify how conditions are mapped and used for a service at various times (e.g., during request processing, when Fastly receives a backend response, or just before an object is potentially cached)

Editing and activating versions of services

With the appropriate permissions, you can activate configuration changes immediately and roll back those changes just as quickly should they not have the intended effect. Fastly locks versions of services you've already activated to make rollbacks safer and provide version control. You can duplicate (clone) any existing service version and edit that cloned version. You must activate new versions of services to deploy their configurations. Configuration changes are never automatically activated.

To clone a service version, follow these steps::

1. Log in to the Fastly control panel.
2. From the Home page, select the appropriate service. You can use the search box to search by ID, name, or domain.
3. From the Service configuration tab, click Clone.

A new version of the service is created and appears in the event log. You can immediately start making edits to this service.

You can also clone a service or select a service version to edit from the Service summary tab:

1. Log in to the Fastly control panel.
2. From the Home page, select the appropriate service. You can use the search box to search by ID, name, or domain.
3. From the Edit configuration menu, select the appropriate service configuration action:
   • Select Clone version [version number] (active) to clone the active version of the service for editing.
   • Select Edit version [version number] (latest draft) to edit the latest draft of the service.

To activate a service version, follow these steps:

1. Log in to the Fastly control panel.
2. From the Home page, select the appropriate service. You can use the search box to search by ID, name, or domain.
3. From the Activate menu on the Service configuration tab, select Activate on Production. The new version of the service is activated and appears in the event log.

Switching between services and service versions

To switch between services associated with your account, follow these steps:

1. Log in to the Fastly control panel.
2. From the Home page, select the appropriate service. You can use the search box to search by ID, name, or domain.

3. From the Service summary or Service configuration page, click the switcher to the right of the service name.

   

4. Select the appropriate service from the list that appears.

To switch between versions of a specific service, follow these steps:

1. From the Service configuration page, click the switcher to the right of the version number.

   

2. Select the appropriate version from the list that appears.

Deleting a service

Fastly allows you to delete any service you create, along with all of its versions. Fastly does not offer a way to delete specific versions of a service, however. Service versions are meant to be a historic log of the changes that were made to a service. To undo changes introduced by a particular service version, you can always go back to a previous version and reactivate or clone a new service version based on any old version.

To delete any service along with all of its versions, follow the steps below:

1. Log in to the Fastly control panel.
2. From the Home page, select the appropriate service. You can use the search box to search by ID, name, or domain.
3. From the Options menu, select Deactivate.
4. Enter the name of the service and click Confirm and deactivate to confirm you want to deactivate your service and acknowledge that you no longer want to serve traffic with it.
5. From the Options menu, select Delete service and then click Confirm and delete to delete the service.

Other things you can do

In addition to creating or editing services, you can rename them and delete them. You can also stage, deactivate, or reactivate specific versions of them.

Renaming services

To rename your service, follow the steps below:

1. Log in to the Fastly control panel.
2. From the Home page, select the appropriate service. You can use the search box to search by ID, name, or domain.
3. From the Options menu, select Edit service name.
4. In the Service name field, enter a new service name.
5. Click Apply. The newly renamed service name appears.

Staging service versions

Our Staging documentation provides more information on testing changes to service configurations on a staging network before deploying them to production.

Adding comments to service versions

Service versions can include comments to label them (e.g., to identify reasons for changes in that version). You can add and update version comments on both locked and activated service versions.

1. Log in to the Fastly control panel.
2. From the Home page, select the appropriate service. You can use the search box to search by ID, name, or domain.

3. From the Service configuration tab, click Add version comment.

   

4. In the Comment field, enter a meaningful comment for the version.

5. Click Save. The truncated version of the comment appears where the Add comment link used to be.

   

You can view service version comments at any time by clicking the version switcher to the right of the version number. Version comments also appear in the event log to help with account activity monitoring.

Comparing different service versions

To compare two versions of a service, follow the steps below:

1. Log in to the Fastly control panel.
2. From the Home page, select the appropriate service. You can use the search box to search by ID, name, or domain.

3. Click Diff versions. The Diff versions page appears.

   Removals are highlighted in red and the additions and changes are highlighted in green. Any large blocks of unaffected configuration lines can be expanded and viewed or collapsed and hidden by clicking on the plus sign to the left of the actual changes, next to the line numbers.

   

   HINT: You can change the compared service versions by clicking Switch versions and selecting a different version number in the menu that appears.

Deactivating a service

To deactivate a service, follow the steps below:

1. Log in to the Fastly control panel.
2. From the Home page, select the appropriate service. You can use the search box to search by ID, name, or domain.
3. From the Options menu, select Deactivate.
4. In the Enter service name field, enter the exact service name to deactivate.
5. Click Confirm and deactivate to confirm you want to deactivate your service and acknowledge that you no longer want to serve traffic with it.

You can also activate or deactivate a service via the API. Did you accidentally delete a service? We can help.

Reactivating a service

To reactivate a service, follow the steps below:

1. Log in to the Fastly control panel.
2. From the Home page, select the appropriate service. You can use the search box to search by ID, name, or domain.
3. Click Edit configuration and then select the option to clone the active version.
4. From the Activate menu, select Activate on Production. The service is reactivated.
5. If you removed the DNS CNAME records for the service's domains when you deactivated the service, you should add new DNS CNAME records now.

Getting help with accidental service deletions

Services can be deactivated or deleted. Deactivated services can be reactivated at any time, but once they've been deleted you must contact Customer Support to have them restored. When sending your request, remember to include:

• your customer ID
• your company name
• your service ID (the name of the service you want restored)

Customer Support will notify you when your service has been restored.

What's next

Learn more about working with domains, hosts, and health checks as you continue to refine versions of your service configurations.

Related content

• About services
• Service API documentation