Fastly is an American cloud company specializing in the “edge,” the infrastructure layer that brings content and certain processing tasks closer to users. Based in San Francisco, it serves media companies, e-commerce sites and digital service providers in particular. Its platform combines a content delivery network, security features and a code execution environment. Its goal: to limit round trips to origin servers, accelerate applications and handle traffic fluctuations. Its official website is fastly.com.
Origins rooted in the needs of the Web
Founded in 2011 by Artur Bergman, Fastly grew out of a recognition that web services need infrastructure that is fast, but also configurable and observable by their technical teams. The company notably relies on Varnish, an open-source HTTP caching technology, to build a programmable content delivery offering. The ability to modify caching rules and rapidly invalidate content became defining elements of its positioning.
Fastly went public in New York in 2019. In 2020, its acquisition of Signal Sciences strengthened its business in protecting applications and application programming interfaces. Its history also highlights the challenges of dependence on shared infrastructure: in June 2021, an outage on its network temporarily made many websites inaccessible. This incident illustrates the critical role CDN providers play in the day-to-day operation of the Internet.
Deliver, execute and protect
The foundation of its offering remains the CDN, or content delivery network. By keeping copies of resources at its points of presence, Fastly reduces the network distance between an application and its visitors. Customers can adjust caching policies, manage file or video distribution and access traffic data. This level of control is particularly valuable to services whose content changes frequently or experiences audience spikes.
With its Compute offering, Fastly also enables code to run at the network edge in an environment based on WebAssembly. Processing can therefore take place before a request reaches the central infrastructure: personalization, authentication or response adaptation, for example. Security rounds out this offering with a web application firewall, protection against denial-of-service attacks and bot management tools. The approach brings delivery, application logic and protection together within a single platform.
What next?
Fastly operates in a competitive market, facing specialists such as Akamai and Cloudflare as well as major cloud providers. Its ability to stand out depends in particular on the quality of its network, the simplicity of its tools and the relevance of its security offering. The growth of edge computing opens up new use cases without replacing central infrastructure. For Fastly, the challenge is to demonstrate where this architecture delivers tangible improvements in latency, resilience or cost, while maintaining trust in a service that has become essential to its customers.