First things first: six resources for building on Fastly

Over the past several months, we’ve seen a significant rise in internet traffic. As more of our time is spent online, businesses have been forced to reimagine not only how they accommodate increased traffic, but also how to provide new types of services over the web.

As such, Fastly has been welcoming developers who are looking into modern CDNs to help deliver these experiences. What they find with Fastly is that the possibilities for what you can build and customize are pretty boundless. If you’re among our newest community members, we’d love to show you more of what Fastly has to offer. 

Once you’ve covered the basics of our getting started guide, check out the resources below to take our programmable edge cloud platform further. I like to start with small edge configurations (redirects, forcing TLS, or URL rewrites) and then iterate. No matter what I’m working on, every time I click that “activate” button and watch the real-time stats page populate, I always get a mix of excitement and satisfaction.

Read on, and start exploring how to take your configurations to the next level. We are truly passionate about customer projects, so don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions or to share.

1. Begin your journey at our Developer Hub

The Developer Hub is the home for everything you need to build on Fastly, including my personal favorite Fastly Fiddle (more on that later). You’ll also find our getting started guide, where you’ll learn how to create your first service, connect to an origin server, activate and test, and eventually go live with Transport Layer Security (TLS) security certificates. 

2. Start building with solutions patterns

Solutions patterns are step-by-step code walkthroughs designed to get you started quickly on Fastly. Think of these as guided templates that you can adjust, customize, and deploy to your Fastly configuration. Topics include A/B testing, geofencing, redirects, and many more. 

To get the most out of these solution patterns, I suggest first coding from the instructions (feel free to parse them down if they’re too big), then add the solution to a service in your Fastly account.

3. Browse the recipe library

Just like trying your hand at a new cuisine, a great way to start experimenting on Fastly is through our recipe library. These recipes are ready-made code samples you can paste into your service, ranging from time formatting to image transformation and optimization. Other interesting recipes include blocking malicious requests using WAF, banning bad IPs for a fixed period, or updating prices and inventory in real time. You can sandbox these recipes safely using Fastly Fiddle. Speaking of...

4. Test with confidence with Fastly Fiddle

Fastly Fiddle is our sandbox testing environment, where you can avoid risk by first trying out code before deploying to your configuration. This is the perfect place to try out some of the solutions from our recipe library.

5. Learn from our community

Find inspiration from how others are using Fastly in our Community. Get insight into feature requests from other developers and explore a host of ways to get more familiar with Fastly. Get ready to:

• Get useful insights on setup.

• Learn how to use our API to take your services further.

• Discover the power of the Fastly VCL language.

• Pick up tips and tricks from the community, or share your own.

6. Stay in the loop with the Fastly blog

Finally, our blog is a treasure trove of how-tos, interesting stories, and thoughts on where the industry is going. We publish new stories every week across a wide variety of subjects, from best practices for using Fastly to behind-the-scenes stories from some of the leading minds in the internet industry. The best way to get the latest updates is to subscribe and follow us on Twitter.

Since our start in 2011, we’ve been empowering developers to build the best of the web. As you build your service on our platform, you'll probably discover that developers choose Fastly because of how customizable it is (worth a note: we don't charge for those customizations). There’s still a ton of untapped potential in terms of what you can do at the edge, and we can’t wait to see what you choose to build. If you need help with any of this, please reach out to my team via email.

Oh and one last pro-tip before I go: Set-up logging. It's free, real-time, and the best tool you didn’t know you were missing.