Fastly

Fastly. Fastly is a prominent American edge cloud platform provider, specializing in content delivery network (CDN), security, and edge computing services. Founded in 2011 by engineer Artur Bergman, the company is headquartered in San Francisco and became a publicly traded entity on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019. Its platform is designed to help developers and businesses deliver digital experiences quickly, securely, and at a global scale, serving a diverse clientele including major media, e-commerce, and technology firms.

History

The company was founded in 2011 by Swedish-born engineer Artur Bergman, who previously held senior roles at Wikia and Twitter. Bergman aimed to build a more programmable and developer-centric alternative to traditional content delivery network providers like Akamai Technologies. In its early years, the company secured significant venture capital funding from firms including August Capital, Battery Ventures, and Iconiq Capital. A major milestone occurred in 2014 when it signed a key partnership with The Guardian, demonstrating its capability to handle high-traffic media sites. The company filed for an initial public offering in 2019 and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol FSLY. In 2020, a major service outage affecting numerous high-profile customers, including The New York Times and GitHub, brought significant attention to the critical nature of its infrastructure.

Services and products

The core offering is its edge cloud platform, which provides a suite of services built around a global content delivery network. Key products include its Compute@Edge environment, which allows developers to deploy custom serverless applications written in WebAssembly at the network edge. The platform also features a robust web application firewall (WAF), bot mitigation technology, and DDoS protection services. It provides image optimization and video streaming solutions, alongside load balancing and API gateway capabilities. These services are managed through a powerful application programming interface (API) and a real-time analytics dashboard, giving customers granular control over content delivery and security policies.

Technology and infrastructure

The platform is distinguished by its massively distributed architecture, consisting of points of presence (POPs) strategically located in major metropolitan areas and internet exchange points worldwide, such as Equinix and DE-CIX. Unlike traditional CDNs that rely heavily on disk-based caching, its network is built on a custom solid-state drive (SSD) caching layer and is designed for low-latency delivery. The core technology stack leverages its own TLS termination and HTTP/2 protocol support. A foundational component is its Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) integration, inherited from the open-source Varnish project, which allows for highly customizable request and response handling logic directly on the edge servers.

Business and operations

The company operates on a usage-based pricing model, charging customers for data transfer, request counts, and edge computing resources consumed. Its customer base spans multiple verticals, including prominent media organizations like The New York Times, e-commerce platforms like Shopify, and technology companies such as Pinterest and Spotify. It competes directly with larger providers like Amazon Web Services (CloudFront), Cloudflare, and Akamai Technologies. The company maintains its headquarters in San Francisco and has additional offices in locations including Denver, New York City, and London. Key executive leadership has included individuals with backgrounds at Google, Cisco Systems, and Adobe Inc..

Security and performance

Security is a central pillar, with the platform offering comprehensive protection against OWASP Top Ten threats, zero-day exploits, and automated botnet attacks through its web application firewall and layered DDoS mitigation systems. It provides real-time logging and analytics via its Log Streaming service, which integrates with tools like Splunk and Datadog for security information and event management (SIEM). Performance is enhanced through technologies like instant purging of cached content, predictive prefetching, and support for modern protocols like HTTP/3 and QUIC. The company also participates in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and contributes to open-source projects related to web performance and security.

Category:American companies established in 2011 Category:Cloud computing providers Category:Content delivery networks Category:Companies based in San Francisco