Back to blog

Follow and Subscribe

Anna MacLachlan

Content Marketing Manager, Fastly

Anna MacLachlan is Fastly’s Content Marketing Manager, where she talks to brands and partners to tell stories about scale, security, and performance. She received her MA in Comparative Literature from NYU and loves megafauna and mountains.

Page 1 of 2

  • 10 questions to ask when evaluating CDNs

    Anna MacLachlan

    In my last blog post, I discussed why you should use a content delivery network. But after you’ve decided to start using a CDN, you’ll need to pick out the right CDN for your business.

  • The benefits of using Varnish

    Anna MacLachlan

    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.

    Performance
    Engineering

  • Fastly’s edge modules that will power your ecommerce site

    Anna MacLachlan

    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.

    Performance
    Compute

  • Improve performance, get user intel with GeoIP | Fastly

    Anna MacLachlan

    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.

    Performance
    Compute

  • Surviving high-traffic events with Fastly

    Anna MacLachlan

    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.

    Performance

  • Why Marketers Should Prioritize Performance

    Anna MacLachlan, Hannah Levy

    You may not know that the software your developers use can affect the success of your marketing activities. It’s within both teams’ interests to collaborate to ensure good performance.

    Performance
    Compute

  • Fastly Engineers Discuss Coding Bootcamps | Fastly

    Anna MacLachlan

    It’s difficult to change course mid-career and educate yourself on a new subject after college has ended. For those entering the field of engineering, it often means taking coding classes or taking part in a coding bootcamp, such as those offered at App Academy, General Assembly, Hackbright Academy, and Hack Reactor.

    Engineering
    Culture

  • The technology that empowers real-time journalism

    Anna MacLachlan

    We’re more engaged online than ever before, especially when it comes to consuming news. If you work with online media brands, you’re well aware that the way readers engage with news events is changing.

    Performance
    + 2 more

  • GitHub’s Joe Williams discusses mitigating security threats

    Anna MacLachlan

    At Fastly Altitude 2015, Joe Williams, a computer operator at GitHub, gave a talk on mitigating security threats (like DDoS attacks) with a CDN. This post is an overview of his talk, with full video and slides included.

    Security

  • How Fastly’s Heroku add-on helps improve experiences

    Anna MacLachlan

    In this Q&A, Fastly’s Michael May and Heroku’s Peter Cho discuss the benefits of Fastly’s Heroku add-on and why it’s important for enterprises to focus on both developer and customer experiences.

    Engineering

  • How to use Fastly + Logentries for insight into log data

    Anna MacLachlan

    Read our Q&A with Logentries’ Director of Product Marketing, Matt Kiernan, and learn how to use Fastly + Logentries for immediate insight into log data.

  • The Beyoncé Drop (and other Super Bowl phenomena)

    Anna MacLachlan

    Last Sunday over 111.9 million viewers tuned in for the Super Bowl. As a CDN, we’re in a unique position — we help companies handle the impact of successful Super Bowl ads, and monitor the results in real time. We thought it might be interesting to share some of the traffic patterns we noticed during the big game.

    Observability

  • The fallacy of fast: Ines Sombra at Altitude 2015

    Anna MacLachlan

    We hosted our first-ever customer summit in June of last year, with the goal of bringing together our customers and the people who build our products to discuss web performance, Varnish, and the future of Fastly. Systems Engineer Ines Sombra’s Altitude 2015 talk, “The fallacy of fast,” reflects on the shortcuts we tend to take when we iterate quickly.

    Engineering

  • Altitude 2016: the future of the edge

    Anna MacLachlan

    Last week we gathered a group of innovative industry leaders from around the world for our second annual customer summit in San Francisco. This year’s Altitude focused on the future of the edge, and we heard from a brilliant group of speakers.

    Customers
    Compute

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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