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Q&A with Miles Ward, Google Cloud Solutions Head | Fastly
We had the opportunity to sit down with Miles Ward and chat about trends in the cloud industry, working with Fastly, and how Google Cloud Platform really sets itself apart.
Defining innovation capacity, part 2: Flexibility capacity
I believe that inflexible technology can promote an aversion to innovation. When building a stack, cost and performance are traditionally prioritized. That makes sense for immediate needs, but companies are finding that the flexibility of that stack matters in the long run.
Innovation Capacity Defined: Tech Stack Values | Fastly
Today's ideas can become tomorrow's indispensable service. This doesn't happen by magic. It takes a toolbox designed for innovative work.
The VCL Cookie Monster
This month's tip is more a theoretical exercise than anything else, just to show the power of VCL, and to explain a few regular expressions. I'm going to discuss VCL that deletes cookies.
FREAK does not affect Fastly services
Fastly is not vulnerable to Logjam — we only offer the more secure Elliptic Curve variant of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange (ECDHE), and the RSA key exchange mechanism for clients that don’t support ECDHE. Since Fastly does not offer any export grade ciphersuite options — and we do not offer the Diffie-Hellman key exchange mechanism — our services are not affected.
Fastly Cloud Accelerator to Connect with GCP | Fastly
In November 2014, we announced Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator, a collaboration with Google Cloud Platform that combines the power of Google’s infrastructure with the speed and flexibility of our real-time content delivery network. We're seeing more of our customers leverage cost-effective cloud services to build scalable infrastructure, and so today we're excited to announce that we're expanding our collaboration with Google Cloud Platform.
Surviving high-traffic events with Fastly
A CDN not only shields your origin from spikes in traffic, but it also ensures speedy delivery of content. This helps you meet your users’ expectations when they visit your site, whether that’s reading the latest news on the royal baby or purchasing a coveted item during a flash sale. To do this well, your CDN needs to have a few key qualities, including prioritizing site uptime and performance, the ability to make updates and serve content in real time, and up-to-the-second visibility into logs and performance analytics. Below, Fastly’s customers discuss how our CDN has helped them during high-traffic events.
Improve CA ops visibility with Cert Transparency | Fastly
If you follow the security news cycle, you may have seen recent discussions about Google detecting a Certificate Authority (CA) in China improperly issuing certificates capable of transparently (that is, without warning) imitating Google TLS-protected websites. As part of the subsequent investigation, Google removed the implicated CA from the list of trusted CAs and indicated that in order for the CA to be considered for re-inclusion, they would have to implement a system known as Certificate Transparency (CT). Below, I’ll outline the basics of CT and how it relates to this and other CA-related incidents in recent history.
Improve performance, get user intel with GeoIP | Fastly
In a previous post, I discussed the benefits of Fastly edge modules. Among those listed is GeoIP / Geography Detection, which is useful for any company (especially those in ecommerce, hospitality/travel, and media) that needs to segment content delivery based on geographic location.
Leveraging your CDN to cache "uncacheable" content
As I've written about before, there is a growing class of content called “event-driven content” that may appear dynamic, but isn’t. Even though caching this type of content is more difficult, it’s possible to cache it with the right tools — although you might have been told otherwise. In doing so, you can leverage the power of caching in new ways and reap the benefits that come along with it.
The Rise of Event-Driven Content
In this post and going forward, we’re going to take a step back, talk about the different types of content our customers are dealing with the most, and discuss how cacheable or uncacheable they are.
Reusing backend connections to increase performance
Reusing connections between your Varnish instance and your backends (origins) is a good idea for multiple reasons. If your Varnish is on the same network as your backends and you're doing low volume traffic, you can stop reading, because a) the difference will probably be negligible, and b) you're probably already reusing backend connections.
Fastly’s edge modules that will power your ecommerce site
Ecommerce companies face challenges that a content delivery network built on Varnish can help address. To stay competitive and relevant, ecommerce websites and applications need to be able to target specific content to specific users (based on location, language, or browsing preferences), tailor content delivery depending on which device a consumer is using, and prioritize shoppers based on actions they’ve taken within a site or app.
Tips for successfully migrating to Fastly
Moving to a new content delivery network (CDN) can seem daunting from an operational standpoint, and it’s important to ensure your CDN is set up correctly before you start migrating all your traffic. In this post, I’ll outline a few steps you can take to experience a smooth migration process to Fastly.
Addressing TLS Revocation and OCSP Challenges
Rotation, expiration, and revocation of secrets are all important concerns that require careful and difficult up-front design. Transport Layer Security (TLS), the protocol underlying secure web traffic (HTTPS), is one of the cryptographic systems with the largest deployment and day-to-day use, and serves as a good case study for all of the proceeding concerns. In this post, I’ll discuss how revocation is addressed in TLS, and how it relates to both performance and security.
Understanding Your End User with Performance Monitoring
End users are consumers who will use a service, and monitoring their performance is often overlooked. See how monitoring performance of end users improves user experience.
The benefits of using Varnish
Varnish is an open source web accelerator that is designed for high-performance content delivery. Learn more about what Varnish is and how Fastly's varnish can help accelerate your content.
Introducing Soft Purge
Today, we’re excited to announce Soft Purge, a new purging feature that allows you to easily mark content as outdated (stale) instead of permanently deleting it from Fastly’s caches. With Soft Purge, you have the same real-time purging options that you get with Instant Purge: purge by URL or by surrogate key.
March 19 OpenSSL Security Advisory
Fastly has evaluated each of these vulnerabilities and found that only one moderate-severity bug affects our configuration. We are currently testing the patch and coordinating a global release of the updated software across Fastly’s network. We anticipate no customer impact or configuration changes.
Cache hit issues? Fix it | Fastly.
The cache hit ratio (or hit ratio for short) is the ratio of hits to cacheable requests (hits and misses combined). There's also cache coverage, the ratio of cacheable requests to all requests (cacheable requests and passes). In most cases, you'll want both to be as high as possible, since misses and passes cause load on your origins, and are slower than cache hits.
