BEHIND THE BEST OF THE WEB
277 Tbps
Connected Global Capacity
As of September 30, 2022
PERFORMANCE AT SCALE
Confidently deliver the best online education experiences at any scale.
Scale on demand to address high-traffic events such as course registration, distance learning, and online exams, without worrying about capacity constraints or bottlenecks. Fastly’s built-in routing and load balancing intelligently handle large volumes of simultaneous requests. Plus, by caching more on Fastly, you can control the need for new cloud regions as students move online and your user base expands, which reduces costs while delivering fast performance.
How Khan Academy successfully handled 2.5x traffic in a week
Serverless and caching strategy are key for scalability.
"Within just two weeks in March, Khan Academy site usage grew to 2.5x what it was at the same time last year and has sustained that level to date. As schools all over the world closed because of the coronavirus pandemic and students, parents, and teachers moved to distance learning, Khan Academy was able to respond, offering high-quality content and classroom experience — for free. In the month of April, we served 30 million learners on our platform.”
Marta Kosarchyn, VP of Engineering
KHAN ACADEMY
Read Khan Academy's engineering blog
BUILT-IN SECURITY
Security you can control, the speed you need.
Protect your services from disruptive downtime and simultaneously secure confidential information and student data. Our massive, globally-distributed network is purpose-built to secure your applications without sacrificing performance. Fastly’s network is architected with DDoS, WAF, and bot protection fully integrated into our PCI-DSS compliant platform. That empowers your team with real-time visibility into potential threats and the ability to push out new security rules globally in seconds. Plus, you can simplify and automate TLS provisioning for a few domains or thousands and offload encrypted traffic at the edge for better performance.
ACCELERATE DYNAMIC CONTENT
Speed up the delivery of dynamic content across your website, mobile apps, and platform integrations.
Serve API responses from the edge with the power to instantly and programmatically invalidate cache. Accelerate the subset of responses that should not be cached and deliver both simultaneously for the fastest possible user experience. Realize cost savings as an added benefit with fewer trips to origin.
REAL-TIME VISIBILITY
Gain insight into your digital health by streaming logs from the edge.
Log any aspect of requests and responses and stream them from the network edge in near real time to the logging endpoint of your choice. By analyzing the data and creating alerts, you can monitor parameters such as request response times, origin failures, and suspicious traffic. These actionable insights will empower you to resolve issues quickly and optimize continuously.
BETTER VIDEO EXPERIENCES
Deliver a faster overall viewing experience with on-the-fly packaging.
Meet and exceed learners’ expectations for responsive digital experiences — even for the most sought-after on-demand video lessons. Rather than requiring you to pre-package all protocols of a viewer-requested video, Fastly on-the-fly packaging (OTFP) allows you to dynamically package video content in different HTTP streaming formats in real time, using source files. Since we only package the portions of video that viewers play, they can start playback immediately instead of waiting for the entire file to be packaged.
Skillsoft reduces latency as they ramp up video content to reach 4x as many students worldwide.
The Challenge
Uptime and availability are mission-critical for scaling online education. With the most extensive course library in the world, Skillsoft offers more than 140,000 videos alongside tens of thousands of courses, books, and audiobooks. And for their 45 million online learners around the world, latency can be a showstopper. The Skillsoft team has had zero reports of latency or availability issues since their traffic quadrupled in 2020 after the COVID-19 pandemic drove demand for online education.
The Solution
By utilizing Fastly's OTFP, Skillsoft was able to reduce video latency and load time by delivering the files in chunks viewable immediately by the end-user. Fastly gives Skillsoft’s dev team complete access and control with VCL, so they can do what they need on their own time, without waiting for support.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw a nearly 400% increase in content consumption on the Fastly network. A testament to Fastly’s ability to scale, we never received any support tickets indicating latency or issues with the increased load on their network.”
Brad MacDonald
Cloud Solutions Engineering Manager, Cloud Operations at Skillsoft
95% CSAT
WORLD-CLASS SUPPORT
Partner with a team who puts your success first.
With a customer satisfaction rating (CSAT) of over 95%* for the past three years running, we pride ourselves on our relationship with our customers. Fastly’s world-class support includes help via chat with Fastly engineers, in-depth tech documentation, solutions packages, Live Event Monitoring, and more.
*as of June 30, 2020
Instant Purge and surrogate key purging
Instantly and programmatically make updates to your cache to confidently provide a fast student experience, updated with the latest information.
Fastly’s Instant Purge gives you the power to invalidate outdated content in cache, in an average of 150 milliseconds globally*. That means you’re not serving students out-of-date information. You can even programmatically initiate Instant Purge to cache frequently or unpredictably changing content, like user comments.
Surrogate keys allow you to selectively and efficiently purge related content by tagging a group of objects with a defined key. You can purge entire classes or libraries of objects, such as class catalog number, term dates, and file types across your site.
*Global mean purge time as of December 31, 2019.
Empowering developers to unleash innovation
Blue/green testing
With near-real-time logs and instant configuration changes, gain the confidence to test new features and services in production without traffic disruptions.
Read Reddit’s tech blog
Multi-cloud or multi-CDN
Deploy Fastly Cloud Optimizer between your existing CDN(s) and cloud services to deliver intelligent routing and network visibility without the need to rearchitect your infrastructure. Reduce origin traffic and egress costs by collapsing multiple redundant requests for the same content into one request to origin. Avoid cloud vendor lock-in with flexible traffic routing.
More on Cloud Optimizer
CI/CD
The days of agile development efforts getting stuck in release queues are over. With Fastly’s edge cloud network, visibility and control are integrated, so you can deploy new software or feature enhancements weekly, daily, or even multiple times a day.
Dive into the tech brief
Secure DevOps
Bake security into your app development processes from the start — without having to make tradeoffs between app performance and security.
Read the blog
Introducing Developer Hub
Fastly was built by developers for developers. Our powerful edge cloud network empowers teams to solve critical business problems through agile software development. You can get hands-on with our technology today at our Developer Hub — where you’ll find our developer tools, world-class documentation, and critical assets to help you get started.