Andrew Betts
Principal Developer Advocate, Fastly
Andrew Betts is the Principal Developer Advocate for Fastly, where he works with developers across the world to help make the web faster, more secure, more reliable, and easier to work with. He founded a web consultancy which was ultimately acquired by the Financial Times, led the team that created the FT’s pioneering HTML5 web app, and founded the FT’s Labs division. He is also an elected member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group, a committee of nine people who guide the development of the World Wide Web.
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Build "For you" recommendations using AI on Fastly!
Forget the hype; where is AI delivering real value? Let's use edge computing to harness the power of AI and make smarter user experiences that are also fast, safe and reliable.
Server-sent events with Fastly
Server-sent events allow web servers to push real-time event notifications to the browser on a long-lived HTTP response.
Your content management system could be so much less painful
CMSs may make the internet go, but they also come with several common challenges that companies, regardless of industry, can face. But that's where Fastly comes in.
Is purging still the hardest problem in computer science?
One of the most common reasons for customers sending support tickets to Fastly is for help with purging content from cache - either it stays too long, or doesn't stay long enough. We have the best purging mechanism of any edge network, so what's going on?
Build a “For You” recommendation page in an hour with Fastly
On this episode of Fastly Developers Live, we discuss the importance of curating a personalized "For You" page using Fastly.
Open source at Fastly is getting opener
We're working on keeping our corner of the open source world even opener with three key updates of our open platform.
The future of device detection on the web
As the future of device detection evolves to protect user data, client hints and other solutions rise to meet the needs of developers looking to deliver a better user experience.
Filter PNGs for Acropalypse using Compute
The Acropalypse put improperly cropped images (and privacy issues) all over the internet. Here’s how Fastly’s Compute could help you clean them up.
Fastly Wins 2022 Devportal Award as Fastly Fiddle Turns 5
Fastly Fiddle, a key feature of the Fastly Developer Hub is a powerful and flexible testing sandbox that allows developers to test configurations without putting their production environments at risk.
OpenTelemetry part 4: Instrumenting Fastly Fiddle
We are very excited about OpenTelemetry. We wrote about why, and also about how to emit telemetry from Fastly's VCL services, and our new Compute platform. But OpenTelemetry's value truly shines when you add it to everything in your stack. What does that look like and is it worth it? We instrumented Fastly Fiddle, from top to bottom, to find out.
Serverless Swift with Compute@Edge by Andrew Barba | Fastly
Recently Andrew Barba, the engineer behind Swift Cloud, released a highly performant and fully featured Swift SDK for our Compute platform. And he built the initial release in just four days, to boot! Understandably impressed, we sat down with Andrew to learn about his goals and build process for the project.
OpenTelemetry Part 2: Using OpenTelemetry in VCL
We're starting to get excited about OpenTelemetry, and want you to be able to observe your Fastly services just like you do with apps running in your core cloud provider — and see the stories of your end user's journeys mapped end to end. VCL services can emit OpenTelemetry data, and be part of that story.
OpenTelemetry Part 1: Making the Edge less distant
One of the main reasons you use Fastly is that we are close to your end users, able to respond in a few milliseconds. But that can also make it feel like Fastly is "outside" your system, "in front". To feel like Fastly is truly part of your application architecture, you need to observe your whole system at the same time, in one place. OpenTelemetry is a new standard that can help.
Taming third parties with a single-origin website
Almost all webpages today load resources from origins other than the one the page came from, which can play havoc with the way your site loads and make it harder to write a strict Content-Security-Policy. In this post, we’ll show you a better way using Compute@Edge.
Migrated developer site to Compute@Edge | Fastly
If you build stuff on Fastly, chances are you spend a decent amount of time on our Developer Hub. Last month, we migrated it from our VCL platform to Compute. Here's how we did it and what you can learn from it.
Lies, stats, debunking Cloudflare | Fastly
A couple of weeks ago Cloudflare, one of our competitors, claimed that their edge compute platform is roughly three times as fast as Compute@Edge. The false claim is a great example of how statistics can be used to mislead.
You can now test Compute code in Fastly Fiddle
Fastly customers have been using our Fiddle tool for years to try out ideas for edge logic in VCL. With the advent of Compute last year, we made our edge compute network accessible to any language that compiles to WebAssembly, and now you can write Compute code in Fiddle too.
Building on top of OAuth at the edge
Authentication is one of the most obvious uses for edge computing. Understanding who your users are as early and as close as possible to their location yields powerful customizations and speedy responses. But there's more than one way to think about how to apply an authentication scheme at the edge.
New ways to compose content at the edge with Compute
It's always been possible to create content programmatically, and with the advent of our serverless compute environment, we've made it possible to create and transform content more efficiently and powerfully than ever before.
Simplifying authentication with OAuth at the edge
The basic concept of performing authentication and then using identity data to make authorization decisions is something that applies to a large majority of web and native apps. Doing this at the edge offers some very significant advantages to both developers and end users.
