Introducing KV Store: Enabling powerful applications at the edge

We are happy to announce that KV Store is now available for purchase to all Fastly customers interested in getting the benefits of running at the edge for more applications like A/B testing, personalization, list management, and more.

KV Store offers global, durable storage for compute functions at the edge running atop the Fastly network. Customers of our serverless compute platform already benefit from having access to logic at the edge and default caching behavior, but they wanted more tools to apply more flexibility to that logic. KV Store offers this flexibility and opens the door to new possibilities without having to fetch data from the central cloud. 

Last year, we launched KV Store to Beta with a ton of customer involvement, and throughout the beta we helped them to fine-tune performance and identify new areas of functionality. The feedback we received was strong — customers and prospects who evaluated our solution versus other edge KV solutions reported meaningful performance advantages with KV Store. With fast reads and writes from both the edge or via API, the developers could store, control, or cache data to reduce origin dependency and unlock new use cases. Now we’re excited to expand access to all of our customers.

KV Store advantages:

• Fast speeds - objects are served via Fastly’s network

• Bulk operations - Our solution will support 100K+ bulk updates

• Unlimited KV Store keys

• Support for large file sizes — starting at 25 MB with expansion to 100 MB upon request

How it works

The benefits of Edge Compute are diminished if the applications at the edge have to go back to the central cloud or the origin server for data. With KV Store there is now an optimized, performant, edge-writable data store to solve that problem and make applications on the edge even better by providing a true ultra low latency key-value store. Developers now have the ability to store, control, or cache their data at the edge instead of having to go back to the central cloud. The data never expires and can be shared by multiple compute services.

This results in the following benefits:

• Faster end user interactions

• Reduced storage and egress costs

• Increased fault tolerance.

“By staging and storing data closer to end users, KV Store provides our customers with a powerful and easy way to create more complex edge applications for faster and safer end-user experiences.” - Lakshmi Sharma, Fastly Chief Product & Strategy Officer

What can you build?

The Fastly KV Store is great for building or enhancing applications served at the Edge. With fast reads and writes from both the edge or via API, you can store, control, or cache your data to reduce origin dependency and unlock new use cases. These include:  

A/B testing support 

Improve performance of A/B testing tools by storing the A/B testing file with Fastly.  This greatly reduces the origin load on provider APIs and helps to mitigate variance in service provider responses at scale.

Personalization 

Store user profile data at the edge.  This enables real time personalization of page content to help improve user engagement without round trips to central data stores.

List Management - IP restrictions and URL Redirects

Store and manage massive lists for use in optimizing Edge network traffic.  KV Store supports extremely large lists over 100M+ items.

Custom URL shortener, SEO Tools

Open Source demonstration project that leverages KV Store to store and serve custom shortened URLs. 

Find out more

KV Store is available for purchase immediately during Limited Availability in our Compute Ultimate Package.  Please contact sales@fastly.com to learn more. 

For more information on how to use Fastly’s KV Store, check out our documentation and example code on our Developer Hub. And if you’re not yet using our serverless platform, explore Compute in depth — for free.