
Bruce Spang
Software Engineer
Bruce Spang is a software engineer at Fastly, where he focuses on building large-scale distributed systems and improving systems reliability. Bruce helped design and build Fastly’s purging system, improved the speed and reliability of the configuration system, and is working on distributed routing algorithms.
Building a Fast and Reliable Purging System
Bruce Spang
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.