Engineering
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Q&A with Miles Ward, Google Cloud Solutions Head | Fastly
Lee Chen
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.
The VCL Cookie Monster
Rogier Mulhuijzen
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.
Fastly Cloud Accelerator to Connect with GCP | Fastly
Lee Chen
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.
Reusing backend connections to increase performance
Rogier Mulhuijzen
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.
Tips for successfully migrating to Fastly
Austin Spires
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.
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.
Cache hit issues? Fix it | Fastly.
Rogier Mulhuijzen
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.
Boost Cache Efficiency with Origin Log Analysis
Rogier Mulhuijzen
If you want to increase the efficiency of your Varnish (or Fastly) cache, you need to figure out what traffic is not cached. By definition, any traffic that reaches your origin is not cached, and thus worthy of investigation.
Normalizing the Host Header
Rogier Mulhuijzen
In the continued quest to increase cache hit ratios, the chant is: "Normalize, normalize, normalize." Less variation in your requests means you have a higher chance of getting hits. This month's highlight is the Host header.
Overriding Origin TTL in Varnish, or My Beginner's Mistake
Rogier Mulhuijzen
A long time ago, I was helping out at a gaming conference where there was an intranet CMS using a Twitter search plugin. Unfortunately, the rather saturated Internet connection was slowing down all of the Twitter search requests. Each page needed 4 searches, at 500ms each, for a total of 2-3 seconds per page.
Best practices for using the Vary header
Rogier Mulhuijzen
Vary is one of the most powerful HTTP response headers. However, if used incorrectly, it can cause problems for developers. Understand vary header best practices to reduce mistakes and improve performance.
Build Your Own Network
Ryan Richards
At Fastly, we’ve been steadily building the world’s most advanced CDN. Since our founding, we’ve expanded the public network to include 17 globally distributed points of presence (POPs) and are now serving more than 20 billion requests per day.
Surrogate Keys: Part 2
Devon O'Dell
One of my favorite computer science jokes is that there are only two truly difficult problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. At Fastly, we deal with these sorts of difficult problems every day. In our previous post on surrogate keys, we discussed how this feature can help you solve the problem of invalidating dynamic content. In this post, we’ll take a look under the hood at how we efficiently represented this system.
