What is Fastly CDN and What Does it Help Customers Do?
Fastly CDN is a powerful, edge cloud platform designed to accelerate content delivery and optimize the performance of websites, applications, and APIs. As a Content Delivery Network (CDN), Fastly helps businesses reduce latency by distributing content through a network of strategically located edge servers worldwide. These servers deliver data and assets (e.g., HTML, images, videos) to users from a location that is geographically closer to them, resulting in faster load times and improved user experience.
Fastly stands out because of its real-time control, allowing customers to manage how content is cached and purged instantly. Businesses using Fastly CDN can:
- Deliver faster and more reliable web content.
- Manage large traffic spikes effectively without compromising user experience.
- Optimize the delivery of dynamic content such as APIs and personalized services.
- Improve security with features like DDoS protection and TLS encryption.
- Gain real-time insights into traffic and performance data.
Benefits of Using Fastly CDN Over Competitors
Fastly is often compared to competitors such as Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Akamai, and others. While each CDN provider has its strengths, here are some key benefits of using Fastly over others:
- Real-Time Configuration and Caching Control:
- Fastly allows customers to configure caching policies and update content instantly. Unlike other CDNs, Fastly offers sub-second cache purging, ensuring that stale or outdated content is removed immediately. This makes it particularly useful for businesses with dynamic content that changes frequently, such as e-commerce or news websites.
- Programmability with Varnish Configuration Language (VCL):
- Fastly is built on Varnish, a highly flexible caching engine. With Fastly’s VCL, customers can write custom logic for handling requests at the edge. This gives more control over how traffic is routed, cached, and delivered compared to CDNs like Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront where customization is more limited.
- High-Performance Edge Infrastructure:
- Fastly’s edge servers are strategically placed in high-density, major global cities with large points of presence (PoPs). This is different from providers like Akamai, which tends to distribute smaller PoPs across more locations. Fastly’s architecture is designed to deliver superior performance by reducing latency and improving response times, especially for high-demand content.
- Better for Modern Applications and Microservices:
- Fastly excels at delivering content for modern applications that rely on APIs and microservices architectures. Its performance is optimized for delivering dynamic, personalized content, and its ability to offload API traffic from origin servers reduces strain and improves speed.
- Transparent, Real-Time Metrics and Analytics:
- Fastly provides real-time logs and analytics that give customers immediate visibility into traffic, latency, and performance data. This real-time insight is particularly useful for troubleshooting and optimization, something that other CDNs may not provide with as much granularity or immediacy.
- Security Features:
- Fastly integrates security at the edge, offering features like DDoS mitigation, Web Application Firewall (WAF), and TLS encryption. Fastly’s edge cloud secures applications while keeping them performant, which is crucial for businesses that need both security and speed without compromising on either.
Fastly boasts an impressive 4.7 out of 5 rating on G2, reflecting its popularity among users. Customers praise its real-time content delivery, robust edge network, and high customization capabilities, making it a top choice for businesses seeking speed and flexibility. With 93% of users giving Fastly a 4-star or higher rating, and 92% noting they would recommend it to others, Fastly continues to stand out as a high-performance CDN solution in the market.
How Should You Benchmark a CDN?
When evaluating and benchmarking a CDN, it’s important to consider several factors to ensure you’re choosing the right solution for your needs. Here’s how you can benchmark a CDN effectively:
- Latency and Load Times:
- Measure how fast the CDN can deliver both static and dynamic content. Latency is a critical metric, especially for businesses that serve users globally. Test load times from various geographical locations using tools like Pingdom, GTmetrix, or WebPageTest to compare different CDN providers.
- Availability and Uptime:
- Evaluate the CDN’s availability during peak traffic and its ability to handle traffic spikes. Look for a CDN with a solid track record of uptime and reliability. Most CDNs claim 99.9% uptime, but the actual performance can vary based on infrastructure and server location density.
- Caching Efficiency:
- Analyze how efficiently the CDN caches content. The more effective a CDN is at caching content at the edge, the less often it needs to make requests back to the origin server, which reduces strain on your infrastructure and improves overall performance.
- Scalability:
- Ensure that the CDN can scale to meet your growing traffic demands. For businesses expecting significant growth or high-traffic events, the CDN should be able to handle increased load without a drop in performance.
- Customization and Control:
- Assess how much control you have over the configuration of your CDN. Some CDNs offer extensive customization, like Fastly’s use of VCL for caching logic, while others may limit flexibility. Your specific needs for routing, security, or custom logic will influence which provider is the best fit.
- Security Capabilities:
- Benchmark the CDN’s security features. Does it offer built-in DDoS protection, WAF, TLS certificates, and bot management? Security is a critical component, especially for businesses handling sensitive customer data.
- Support and SLA:
- Evaluate the quality of customer support and the terms of the Service Level Agreement (SLA). A good CDN provider will offer strong technical support, especially during critical incidents. Consider response times, availability of 24/7 support, and guaranteed service levels.
Conclusion
Fastly CDN stands out as a high-performance content delivery platform that offers real-time control, advanced caching options, and security features tailored for modern applications and dynamic content. While competitors like Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, and Akamai also offer robust solutions, Fastly excels in programmability, real-time analytics, and high-performance edge infrastructure.
When choosing a CDN, it’s important to benchmark based on latency, availability, security, customization, and scalability to ensure you are getting the best performance for your business needs. Even if you decide to stay with your current provider, regularly benchmarking CDNs can help you negotiate better terms, optimize performance, and future-proof your content delivery strategy.
Regularly Benchmark & Research
Regularly researching and benchmarking your technology stack is a critical practice that ensures your business remains competitive, efficient, and cost-effective. As new tools emerge and market pricing fluctuates, periodic reviews will allow you to maintain an edge—technically and financially. IT-SR specializes in helping businesses efficiently audit and benchmark their software services, offering insights into areas where they can improve performance and reduce costs.
Contact us today to explore how we can help you optimize your software stack and maximize your technology investment.