#1 most frequent
United States of America
74.2%66 installations of 89
What is Fastly Edge Cloud Platform?
Fastly, headquartered in San Francisco, offers the Fastly Edge Cloud Computing, Content Delivery Network (CDN) (formerly Fastly Deliver@Edge). Priced by bandwidth in gigabytes and number of file requests, Fastly supports image optimization, video and streaming, load balancing, and cloud security via web application firewall (WAF) and DDoS protection. Additionally, Fastly is available as a managed CDN.
Categories & Use Cases
Who Buys & Uses Fastly Edge Cloud Platform
#2 most frequent
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
6.7%6 installations of 89
#3 most frequent
Canada
4.5%4 installations of 89
Essential for Optimizing Adobe Commerce On-Premise
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We adopted Fastly Edge Cloud Platform to enhance the performance and scalability of our Adobe Commerce on-premise setup. Our key objectives were improving content delivery through a robust CDN, implementing full-page caching for better load management, and ensuring strong security with TLS Encryption. Fastly Edge Cloud Platform has been a critical solution in achieving these goals.
Pros
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Full Page Caching
- TLS Encryption
Cons
- CDN ehnanced features, like image manipulation
- Full Page Caching is a powerful tool, but it’s best suited for experienced developers due to the lack of a user-friendly graphical interface
Return on Investment
- FPC without the need to build and configure a dedicated infrastructure
- reliable and fast content delivery across global regions
Usability
Quality Edge Delivery Service
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We used Fastly both as the pre-configured caching backbone for all our customers as well as a highly-customized edge provider for customers who required more control than the pre-configured version gave them. The use cases could be anything from SEO optimization to enhanced security protection. We also implemented Fastly as a means of providing additional functionality, such as edge logging and image optimization, that could be scaled across multiple web properties with a single configuration.
Pros
- Comprehensive API.
- Feature-rich UI.
- Excellent documentation.
- Fine-grained custom VCL.
Cons
- WAF is hard to configure.
- No comprehensive rate limiting without a pricey upgrade.
- Account access controls are extremely limited.
Most Important Features
- Support.
- Security - either the in-house waf or recent Signal Sciences acquisition.
- Speed.
- API-driven allows us to use Terraform or custom REST calls to quickly spin up new configurations.
Return on Investment
- Adding a custom fastly implementation to our sales SKUs opened up 10s of millions of dollars in ARR in a single year.
- Fastly enabled us to sell to nearly 100 customers a year that we otherwise would not have been able to service.
- We did end up needing to spend nearly $500k/yr for custom TLS certificates (2000 domains).
Other Software Used
Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Salesforce.com, Google Cloud DNS
Super configurable CDN with unparalleled features and performance
Pros
- You can put your site behind Fastly and then selectively cache only some of the endpoints. You can modify the responses returned by stripping cookies or other personalization headers.
- You can deliver images, and based on the user agent being Chrome, decide to serve, for example, a WEBP image format instead of PNG or JPG.
Cons
- Not sure
Return on Investment
- While I was at Wanelo we were able to put Fastly in front of the growing web app, and selectively cache end points to improve stability and performance. In the meantime we rewrote the app completely in Ruby. We wouldn’t have been able to do that without Fastly.
Alternatives Considered
AWS Cloud9, Amazon CloudFront and CloudFlare
Other Software Used
New Relic APM, Datadog, PostgreSQL
Fastly Review
Pros
- Very performant and fast -- major companies have drastically reduced page load times with Fastly's edge technology.
- Support for many types of media, including video.
- Image add-on makes serving and manipulating images very simple.
Cons
- Setup can be difficult -- but only because the service is so robust and provides so many features.
- Minimum spend is $50/month, even if you are not using the service enough to have spent the $50.
Return on Investment
- Fastly dramatically reduces load times for clients all over the world thanks to their global system of POPs.
- Fastly is a cost-effective choice when a highly-performant CDN is required and makes it simple to support data that is quickly invalidated.
Alternatives Considered
Amazon CloudFront, Azure CDN and Firebase
Other Software Used
Amazon CloudFront, Azure CDN