Fastly Edge Cloud Platform Reviews & Insights

We adopted Fastly Edge Cloud Platform to enhance the performance and scalability of our Adobe Commerce on-premise setup. Our key objectives were improving content delivery through a robust CDN, implementing full-page caching for better load management, and ensuring strong security with TLS Encryption. Fastly Edge Cloud Platform has been a critical solution in achieving these goals.

Fastly Edge Cloud Platform is ideal for deploying Full Page Caching as a service without the need to build and configure a dedicated infrastructure. This is particularly beneficial for applications that require efficient server-side caching to handle high volumes of traffic. Additionally, Fastly Edge Cloud Platform excels as a highly functional CDN, offering reliable and fast content delivery across global regions.

We used Fastly both as the pre-configured caching backbone for all our customers as well as a highly-customized edge provider for customers who required more control than the pre-configured version gave them. The use cases could be anything from SEO optimization to enhanced security protection. We also implemented Fastly as a means of providing additional functionality, such as edge logging and image optimization, that could be scaled across multiple web properties with a single configuration.

The service is really well-suited for pretty much any site that is primarily display-driven (that is, mostly GET requests). The network is able to handle massive volumes of traffic and their POPs have spread out pretty much anywhere that it's easy to get them (so basically everywhere but China and Russia). My team witnessed several large-scale attack attempts on some high-profile websites (attacks in the 10s of millions of requests per second) that were mitigated before ever coming back to the actual application; in one case we didn't realize the attack had happened until we looked at the logs the next day. Because it's a cache store option, the default configuration does not cache POST responses, and it can be difficult to set up things like authenticated paywalls as a result.

Fastly is a highly performant CDN and edge computer service, with an impressive list of clients that use its services. Unlike most traditional CDNs, Fastly requires that all traffic be served through it via a CNAME change, similar to CloudFlare (as opposed to a more traditional CDN, like Cloudfront or MaxCDN). This gives Fastly the ability to quickly serve even very low TTL event content, like game scores, news, and stock prices.

For the use case that it was designed for, Fastly is best-in-class, and used by high-profile companies like Buzzfeed, The New York Times, and Stripe. For websites that require a highly-performant CDN layer, Fastly is a great choice. Fastly is not the best choice for very small companies and very small deployments, and it does not have the ease of implementation into large cloud PaaS vendors like AWS or Azure.

Fastly is a fantastic CDN / proxy layer for any web application. It’s built on Varnish, which offers a way to customize the caching and delivery of the web content to the end user with maximum flexibility, but without incurring a performance penalty. This is due to Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) being a compiled language.

Fastly is well suited to be the CDN or the caching layer in your app