Layercake scales live streaming production at the edge with Fastly

The challenge

Layercake is a Sydney-based software organization building solutions for media, entertainment, and sports industries. Founded by Domenic Romeo and his team, Layercake developed a global media orchestration platform that helps customers optimize their media workflows from live production to consumer devices. As the company expanded its capabilities, Romeo faced a critical challenge: how to deliver high-performance consumer experiences at scale without building extensive infrastructure at the origin.

Live production presents unique engineering requirements that set Layercake apart. Traffic patterns during major sporting events spike dramatically at the start of an event, creating massive demand for video delivery. "We deliver solutions for consumer applications where there is a huge spike in demand for video, especially live video," Romeo explained. "We see traffic for major events.spike incredibly at the start of an event." Without the ability to process data at the edge and scale on demand, serving these audiences would be impossible. Layercake needed a partner that could handle this unique traffic profile while allowing them to shift core processing away from their origin.

The solution

Romeo's journey with Fastly began years ago when he deployed Fastly for a major sporting organization in Australia. That experience shaped his understanding of what a modern CDN could deliver. When Layercake became an official Fastly customer, the partnership opened new possibilities for innovation at the edge. "We're working with the Fastly team on innovative solutions at the edge, and that's extending our capability to provide customers with highly intelligent, highly dynamic solutions for stream play out at the edge," Romeo said.

Reducing total cost of ownership through edge processing

Fastly's edge cloud platform allowed Layercake to fundamentally change their approach to infrastructure. "Fastly has really added value to the solutions we're building where we can now confidently say that we can shift some of our core processing and intelligence from the cloud, to the edge," Romeo said. This shift delivered two critical benefits: high performance and scalability without the need to build that capacity at the origin. "It's really lowering our cost of operating the platform, as well as giving us the ability to grow at a pace that would be potentially inhibiting if we had to do this ourselves at the origin."

Performance benchmarks proved decisive in Layercake's vendor selection. The team ran comprehensive tests across multiple vendors, measuring processing response times and data access speeds for Key Value Store and Object Storage capabilities. "We ran a number of benchmarks across a number of vendors and Fastly outperformed all of them by a factor," Romeo said. "The performance of Fastly Object Storage was astounding. We're talking about read times well under one millisecond, which allows us to build intelligent solutions using information at the edge that allows us to not only perform well, but to scale well when large traffic hits it."

Building unified authentication for live streaming at scale

Beyond their initial implementation, Layercake is working with Fastly's technical teams to develop solutions for one of live streaming's most persistent challenges: authentication at scale. The industry faces fragmentation in how different applications handle stream authentication, and implementing common security practices across platforms remains difficult. "We're using Fastly's Edge to develop that, which allows multiple authentication methods behind the scenes to be obfuscated with a single stream authentication framework," Romeo explained. "At scale, that can only happen with the level of compute and capacity that a vendor like Fastly can provide."

The validation process for Layercake's edge solution required close collaboration with Fastly's engineering teams. "What we are doing is fairly novel. It hasn't been done on the edge before, and there were certain directions with the solution that we needed to go with and validate," Romeo said. "The Fastly technical team provided us with incredible support to not only validate what we did, but optimize it before we launched it." This partnership extended beyond technical validation to commercial viability, ensuring Layercake could scale their customer base sustainably.

Key takeaway

For startups like Layercake operating in live production environments, the ability to perform at scale isn't optional. "Without the level of performance and scale at the edge that Fastly can provide us, it would be impossible for us to provide that service," Romeo said. The partnership continues to evolve as Layercake explores new capabilities at the edge, building on foundations that now allow them to try new approaches to long-standing industry challenges. When asked to describe Fastly, Romeo chose "innovative," noting how the platform stays true to its core principle of improving people's experience with the internet while bridging the gap between content creators and consumers.