Fastly principal engineer Jason Cook explains how he uses iPXE and Chef to get to boot management bliss. Check out his slides from ChefConf 2014 here.

 

 

Fastly is a developer-minded CDN, so we're always looking for ways to integrate with the most popular frameworks and platforms. Today, we're happy to announce a number of improvements aimed at the Ruby on Rails community.

Today, Fastly principal engineer Jason Cook will be speaking at ChefConf 2014 in San Francisco. His talk will focus on building a boot system using Chef's API and iPXE to create a lightweight tool for managing install and firmware updating of hosts and network gear.

Here’s the latest update on the ongoing resolution to critical OpenSSL vulnerability CVE-2014-0160, aka 'Heartbleed,' which was announced on April 7th and affects nearly every Internet service provider and website using SSL to secure customer traffic.

This week, we’re traveling to Montreal for PyCon 2014. If you’ll be there, make sure to stop by booth #611 in the Exhibit Hall to chat with a Fastly engineer, explore our real-time analytics dashboard, and pick up a Fastly shirt.

We were thrilled to be a part of Fluent Conf 2014. Big thanks to everyone who stopped by the Fastly booth to chat with our engineers and pick up a Fastly shirt.

If you missed Fastly CPO Steve Souders' Fluent talk about the Perception of Speed, you can watch it below.

The Fastly team is attending Fluent this week in San Francisco. We’ll be at booth #206 right next to our friends from New Relic. Come by to talk with one of our engineers, grab a Fastly shirt, and learn how to win our DevOps survival kit.

Today, we’re excited to welcome three new Fastly team members.

In this, our final API Caching installment, we're going to explore how to use Surrogate Keys to reduce the overall complexity of caching an API.

At Fastly, we’re always working to make our systems faster and more reliable. One of the more difficult problems we’ve faced is efficient cache invalidation across our global network, or as we call it: Instant Purging. When content changes, our customers issue a purge request, which we then need to deliver to each of our cache servers. The system that handles these purge requests is codenamed Powderhorn.

Build a network that can scale indefinitely, be managed by a small crew of skilled ops and network engineers, and handle current web traffic and the next generation of protocols. Sounds impossible, right?

Not true.

When planning a major content delivery network, you’d think that it would make sense to put your equipment where the most people are, right?

Not always.

In Part 1, we covered the basics of using Fastly to accelerate a comments API. Using Instant Purge, we hooked into model callbacks to ensure that the appropriate content was purged from the cache whenever data changed. In this article, we’ll build upon the original approach and use one of Fastly’s more advanced features: cache control.

Over the last few months, we’ve completely overhauled Fastly’s entire logging infrastructure to keep up with our ever-increasing traffic. In addition to improving efficiency and reliability, we added features to make it easier for our customers to integrate with the logging providers they already use.

Last week, Fastly engineer Jason Cook spoke about TCP tuning at the 2014 Linux Conference in Australia. His session covers tuning several aspects of your application and the underlying TCP stack to deliver the best possible performance over the public Internet. If you missed it, check out the video below.

Since day one, we’ve baked the concept of versions right into our system at a fundamental level. We want customers to feel empowered to try new things and to be able to quickly roll them back or create a new version if changes are needed. We’ve brought DevOps best practices to our CDN.

During the holiday season, which normally accounts for 20-40% of total sales annually, it's critical for e-retailers to provide their users with a smooth, responsive shopping experience. Recent research has shown that 40% of online shoppers will move to a competitor’s site if yours doesn't load in 3 seconds or less. In fact, about $3 billion in revenue is lost annually due to customers abandoning shopping carts on slow web sites. With that in mind, here are Fastly’s top 5 tips for optimizing and speeding up your site for the holidays.

The web has come a long way since the 90s. In the past, sites were commonly driven by a single, monolithic application that acted as the only communication medium to a centralized database. The modern approach is to break this one large application into a set of interdependent and cooperative services.

Ensuring a smooth end user experience with short page load times - whether for shopping online, reading the news, or collaborating on software - is one of the main reasons Fastly customers use our Content Delivery Network. Viewers' expectations for page load times have become increasingly demanding.