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  • Solving VCL auth & feature flags at the edge | Fastly

    Rogier Mulhuijzen, Anna MacLachlan

    In “How to solve anything” parts 1 and 2, we outlined how to use Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) to address some of your more challenging problems. In this post, we’ll discuss how Andrew Betts of the Financial Times uses advanced VCL to securely cache and serve authenticated and authorized content, and set up feature flags.

    Engineering

  • Election day 2016

    Tyler McMullen

    Although online engagement increases with every election, the 2016 presidential election saw an especially dramatic boost. As surprising polling results rolled in across the nation, voters and global observers turned to trusted media sites to follow the politically polarizing race — here are some of the traffic patterns we observed.

    Observability

  • A step towards better Web API authentication

    Toru Maesaka

    The Fastly API is an integral part of our CDN — using our APIs, customers are able to instantly reflect configuration changes, purge content, and perform anything that is available on the Fastly control panel from within their application. In this post, Toru discusses our new API authentication method, API tokens.

    Engineering
    + 3 more

  • The evolution of election technology

    Elaine Greenberg, Anna MacLachlan

    With more and more ways for candidates to engage with voters online, campaigns face a unique set of technical challenges, many of which weren’t present during the last presidential election. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the technical challenges candidates’ engineering teams face in 2016, as well as some of the strategies we’ve seen.

  • Announcing Fastly Managed CDN

    Artur Bergman

    Today, we’re pleased to announce general availability of the Fastly Managed CDN, a custom-built solution for high-traffic, content-driven businesses that need the benefits of a DIY content delivery solution without dedicating significant internal budget and resources to building their own.

    Product

  • A/B testing at the edge

    Chris Jackel

    A/B testing is valuable, aggravating, and everyone has an opinion on the best way to do it. At Fastly, we provide a set of tools to help enable experiments you can integrate into your own analytics.

    Performance
    + 2 more

  • Major moments from the third and final presidential debate

    Tyler McMullen

    This election has garnered an unprecedented amount of attention, and while traffic to media sites increased during the third debate, major moments of engagement (spikes) decreased by 83% as compared to the first debate. Here are some of the traffic patterns we saw.

    Observability

  • Lean Threat Intelligence, Part 4: Batch alerting

    Zack Allen

    In Part 3, we showcased a technology that allows you to route messages to and from topics via Kafka. Now that data is flowing, how can you start monitoring and reacting to security events? In this post, we’ll show you a batch alerting strategy that you can use with Graylog and Kafka.

    Security

  • VCL problem-solving: SOA routing & non-ASCII support | Fastly

    Rogier Mulhuijzen, Anna MacLachlan

    In “How to solve anything, part 1,” we discussed Andrew Betts’ clever tips for using Fastly’s Custom Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) to collect data at the edge. In this post, we’ll look at how Nikkei uses VCL to deal with a service-oriented architecture as well as write synthetic responses with non-ASCII characters.

    Engineering

  • Announcing our 30th POP: Paris!

    Tom Daly

    We’re pleased to announce that our 30th POP has come online to the Fastly Network. Located in Paris, France, our new CDG POP is designed to better service Europe by decreasing latency and increasing bandwidth for users in the region.

    Performance
    + 3 more

  • The elements of scaling

    Anna MacLachlan

    Camille Fournier, former CTO of Rent the Runway and self-described senior thinker and raconteur, spoke at Altitude 2016 on her experience in leadership, sharing how she overcame the communication barrier that comes with growth to scale successful, happy teams.

    Engineering

  • Automating Fastly with Terraform

    Seth Vargo

    HashiCorp’s Director of Technical Advocacy discusses Terraform, their tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently, and how they use it to codify Fastly configurations.

    DevOps
    + 3 more

  • How the internet reacted to the first presidential debate

    Tyler McMullen

    As a CDN, we’re in a unique position to view traffic patterns: we’re able to get a closer look into traffic trends and spikes as they occur. This year’s presidential debate drew a record number of viewers — here are some of the traffic patterns we observed.

    Observability

  • VCL problem solving: collect edge data | Fastly

    Rogier Mulhuijzen, Anna MacLachlan

    At our second annual customer summit, Andrew Betts of the Financial Times discussed using VCL to “solve anything” — pushing his team’s problems to the CDN layer.

    Engineering

  • Don’t let your successes bring you(r site) down

    Anna MacLachlan

    Often the main goal for marketing and advertising campaigns is to point visitors to your website, and it’s important you’re prepared for the success you’ll (hopefully) see. Hear how Fastly customer Dollar Shave Club launched a successful ad while maintaining site uptime and performance throughout, as well as best practices for making sure your major successes don’t bring you down.

    Performance
    + 2 more

  • Best practices for protecting your domain

    Maarten Van Horenbeeck

    We continuously work on making the edge more secure, and develop features you can leverage to protect your applications. However, in order for you to benefit from these investments, there are steps you should take at the crucial stage where traffic is handed off to the CDN. In this post, Director of Security Engineering Maarten Van Horenbeeck discusses how (and why) you can protect traffic on its way to the CDN.

    Security

  • The future of the edge

    Tyler McMullen

    In this post, Tyler McMullen will explore “the future of the edge,” or the next logical step in how we streamline online experiences. In order to keep up with the direction things are headed, we need to combine logic and data at the edge. Logic without data, without state, is insufficient.

    Engineering
    Compute

  • Sponsoring the Tor project with content delivery services

    Maarten Van Horenbeeck

    Fastly has historically supported many open source projects. We’re happy to announce that Fastly now provides sponsored Content Delivery for the Tor Project. TorBrowser updates are served over the Fastly network, taking load off of the Tor Project's backend servers and speeding up downloads for end users.

    Security
    Customers

  • Our security team’s vision for defending the modern web

    Jose Nazario, PhD

    Director of Security Research Jose Nazario describes our team’s vision for employing our CDN’s unique position to defend the modern web. Using the recent HTTPoxy vulnerability as an example, he outlines the benefits and challenges of this vision.

    Security

  • Beacon termination at the edge

    Hooman Beheshti

    Using a CDN for beacon termination at the edge has gotten a lot of attention, in part because edge termination for beacons is cool; but it’s mostly because beaconing applications are becoming more popular and they involve a lot of components, deployed at scale, to accommodate proper data collection.

    Performance
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