What is Fastly?
Fastly is a fully programmable edge cloud platform designed to optimize web and application performance, providing robust security and comprehensive observability solutions. Leveraging a software-defined global network, it delivers content with reduced latency, robust real-time caching, and dynamic scaling to ensure fast and reliable digital experiences for users worldwide. The platform integrates next-generation web application firewalls, instant purging, load balancing, log streaming, and edge computing for seamless management and protection of web assets, APIs, and applications.
Fastly’s services cater to a wide range of industries, including ecommerce, streaming media, travel, financial services, and digital publishing. With detailed analytics, developer-friendly controls, and customizable support packages, organizations benefit from enhanced control, scalability, and security. The platform also offers advanced features such as real-time threat mitigation, semantic API request caching, image optimization, and easy integration into existing CI/CD workflows to streamline digital operations and exceed user expectations.
Features
- Programmable Edge Cloud: Fully programmable infrastructure for custom logic and application delivery at the edge.
- Next-Gen Web Application Firewall: Advanced real-time protection against web application threats with flexible configuration.
- Semantic Caching for LLM APIs: Adds semantic caching to popular large language model provider APIs to optimize AI workloads.
- Instant Purge: Ultra-fast cache invalidation with an average purge time of 150ms.
- Global CDN Network: Powerful global content delivery with high cache capacity and reduced latency.
- Comprehensive Observability: Real-time metrics, logs, alerts, and insights for performance monitoring and troubleshooting.
- Image Optimization: On-the-fly image transformation and delivery directly from the edge.
- Bot and DDoS Protection: Automated, scalable protection against malicious bots and distributed denial-of-service attacks.
- Edge Data Storage: Managed key-value and secret stores for sharing and securing data at the edge.
- Developer-Friendly Platform: Comprehensive CLI tools, documentation, and integration with CI/CD pipelines.
Use Cases
- Accelerating ecommerce website performance and ensuring secure retail transactions.
- Delivering low-latency, high-quality media streaming experiences for a global audience.
- Enhancing travel and hospitality booking systems with real-time dynamic content caching and API acceleration.
- Securing financial services web apps and APIs with adaptable WAF and DDoS defense.
- Optimizing digital publishing platforms to efficiently handle high-traffic breaking news and viral content.
- Scaling SaaS and PaaS applications with reliable edge computing and instant scalability.
- Implementing secure API access for AI/ML workloads through semantic caching.
- Gaining actionable insights with real-time observability and log streaming for distributed applications.
FAQs
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What is Fastly’s Free Tier?
Fastly’s Free Tier provides $50 per month worth of CDN traffic, unlimited requests with no throttling, and instant purging capabilities to help users evaluate and start using the platform. -
How does Fastly improve website and application performance?
Fastly optimizes performance by delivering content through a powerful global network using advanced caching, edge computing, and real-time load balancing for reduced latency and faster user experiences. -
What security features are included with Fastly?
Fastly offers comprehensive security, including web application firewall (WAF), DDoS protection, bot management, TLS/SSL management, and rate limiting to defend against a wide range of online threats. -
Can Fastly be integrated with my existing CI/CD workflows?
Yes, Fastly provides developer-friendly APIs, CLI tools, and documentation to facilitate seamless integration into existing continuous integration and deployment workflows.
