What is Fastly?

Fastly's real-time content delivery network gives you total control over your content, unprecedented access to performance analytics, and the ability to instantly update content in 150 milliseconds.
Fastly is a tool in the Content Delivery Network category of a tech stack.

Who uses Fastly?

Companies
831 companies reportedly use Fastly in their tech stacks, including Twitter, Udemy, and LaunchDarkly.

Developers
210 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Fastly.

Fastly Integrations

WordPress, Amazon S3, Heroku, Datadog, and Magento are some of the popular tools that integrate with Fastly. Here's a list of all 24 tools that integrate with Fastly.
Pros of Fastly
28
Real-time updates
26
Fastest CDN
22
Powerful API
20
Great support
14
Great customer support
7
Instant Purging
7
Custom VCL
6
Good pricing
6
Tag-based Purging
5
HTTP/2 Support
4
Speed & functionality
4
Image processing on demande (Fastly IO)
4
Best CDN
Decisions about Fastly

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Fastly in their tech stack.

Paul Whittemore
Developer and Owner at Appurist Software · | 15 upvotes · 1.1M views

I'm building most projects using: Server: either Fastify (all projects going forward) or ExpressJS on Node.js (existing, previously) on the server side, and Client app: either Vuetify (currently) or Quasar Framework (going forward) on Vue.js with vuex on Electron for the UI to deliver both web-based and desktop applications for multiple platforms.

The direct support for Android and iOS in Quasar Framework will make it my go-to client UI platform for any new client-side or web work. On the server, I'll probably use Fastly for all my server work, unless I get into Go more in the future.

Update: The mobile support in Quasar is not a sufficiently compelling reason to move me from Vuetify. I have decided to stick with Vuetify for a UI for Vue, as it is richer in components and enables a really great-looking professional result. For mobile platforms, I will just use Cordova to wrap the Vue+Vuetify app for mobile, and Electron to wrap it for desktop platforms.

See more

Blog Posts

GitGitHubSlack+30
27
18691
GitHubPythonDocker+24
13
17080

Fastly's Features

  • static content delivery
  • event-driven content delivery
  • Dynamic Site Acceleration (DSA)
  • API caching
  • Instant Purge
  • Soft Purge
  • surrogate keys
  • streaming and VOD
  • Real-time Analytics
  • instant configuration
  • instant deploys
  • built on Varnish
  • Custom VCL upload
  • on-demand DDoS mitigation
  • Transport Layer Security
  • PCI compliance and compliance services
  • Origin Shield
  • real-time streaming logs
  • Historical Stats
  • Edge Dictionaries
  • Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator
  • Configuration Control Panel
  • stale-if-error
  • stale-while-revalidate
  • Edge Side Includes (ESI)
  • GeoIP/geography detection
  • mobile device detection
  • edge authorization/paywalls
  • shopper prioritization

Fastly Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Fastly?
CloudFlare
Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet.
Akamai
If you've ever shopped online, downloaded music, watched a web video or connected to work remotely, you've probably used Akamai's cloud platform. Akamai helps businesses connect the hyperconnected, empowering them to transform and reinvent their business online. We remove the complexities of technology, so you can focus on driving your business faster forward.
Netlify
Netlify is smart enough to process your site and make sure all assets gets optimized and served with perfect caching-headers from a cookie-less domain. We make sure your HTML is served straight from our CDN edge nodes without any round-trip to our backend servers and are the only ones to give you instant cache invalidation when you push a new deploy. Netlify is also the only static hosting service with integrated continuous deployment.
Varnish
Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture.
StackPath
Build your applications and services at the edge, with Edge Computing and Edge Services that give you high performance, full security, and total control.
See all alternatives

Fastly's Followers
505 developers follow Fastly to keep up with related blogs and decisions.