Fastly

American web infrastructure company

Fastly, Inc.

Company type| Public

Traded as

* NYSE: FSLY (Class A)
* Russell 2000 component

Industry| Internet
Founded| March 2011; 13 years ago (2011-03)
Founder| Artur Bergman
Headquarters| San Francisco, California, U.S.

Key people

* Todd Nightingale (CEO)
* David Hornik (Chairman)
* Tyler McMullen (CTO)
* Ronald W. Kisling (CFO)

Services|

* Content delivery network
* Security as a service
* Serverless computing
* Website performance

Revenue|  US$506 million (2023)

Operating income

|  US$−198 million (2023)

Net income

|  US$−133 million (2023)
Total assets|  US$1.53 billion (2023)
Total equity|  US$979 million (2023)

Number of employees

| 1,207 (2023)
ASN|

* 54113

Website| www.fastly.com
Footnotes / references
[1]

Fastly, Inc. is an American cloud computing services provider. It describes its network as an edge cloud platform, which is designed to help developers extend their core cloud infrastructure to the edge of the network, closer to users.[2] The Fastly edge cloud platform includes their content delivery network (CDN), image optimization, video and streaming, cloud security, and load balancing services.[3] Fastly's cloud security services include denial-of-service attack protection, bot mitigation, and a web application firewall.[4] Fastly's Next Generation Web Application Firewall makes reliable, accurate decisions through patented architecture and proprietary detection technology SmartParse, which makes contextual, instantaneous decisions inline to determine if malicious or anomalous payloads are present.

The Fastly platform is built on top of Varnish.[5] As of March 2024,[update] Fastly transfers 336 Tbps of data.[6][7][better source needed]

## History

[edit]

Fastly was founded in 2011 by the Swedish-American entrepreneur Artur Bergman, previously chief technical officer at Wikia (now Fandom).[8][9] In June 2013, Fastly raised $10 million in Series B funding.[10] In April 2014, the company announced that it had acquired CDN Sumo, a CDN add-on for Heroku.[11] In September 2014, Fastly raised a further $40 million in Series C funding,[12] followed by a $75 million Series D round in August 2015.[13]

In September 2015, Google partnered with Fastly and other content delivery network providers to offer services to its users.[14] In April 2017, Fastly launched its edge cloud platform along with image optimization, load balancing, and a web application firewall.[3][15]

Fastly raised $50 million in funding in April 2017,[16] and another $40 million in July 2018.[17] The company filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in April 2019 and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17, 2019.[18][19] In February 2020, Bergman stepped down as CEO and assumed the role of chief architect and executive chairperson; Joshua Bixby took over the CEO role.[20]

In August 2020, Fastly announced it was acquiring cybersecurity company Signal Sciences for $775 million ($200 million in cash and $575 million in stock).[21]

In June 2021, Ronald W. Kisling, previously employed by Alphabet as the CFO of the Fitbit division, was hired to serve as Fastly's CFO, succeeding Adriel Lares. He assumed the position in August 2021.[22][23]

In May 2022, Fastly announced it had acquired Glitch, a web coding platform with more than 1.8 million developers.[24][25]

In August 2022, Todd Nightingale, previously employed by Cisco as Executive Vice President of Enterprise Networking and Cloud business, was hired to serve as Fastly's CEO, succeeding Joshua Bixby.[26]

In August 2023, it was announced Fastly has acquired the domain status API provider, Domainr.[27]

In June 2024, Fastly announced the launch of their artificial intelligence 'accelerator' at their first-ever event held in New York City. This accelerator would provide developers with faster and cheaper access to AI via their edge computing API, initially supporting ChatGPT, with intent to support additional models.[28][29]

## Operation

[edit]

Fastly's CDN service follows the reverse proxy model, routing all website traffic through their own servers instead of providing a 'cdn.mydomain.com' address to store site-specific files. It then fetches content from the point of presence nearest to the location of the requesting user, out of nearly 60 worldwide.[30] Aside from a free account tier that offers US$50 per month worth of CDN traffic and uncapped access to features such as redirects and DDoS mitigation, it is priced as a pay-as-you-go service subject to a US$50 per month minimum charge, with bandwidth charged at variable rates depending on region.[27][31][32] Content is not directly uploaded to their servers, rather it is pulled periodically from the origin server and cached in order to reduce the time required for an end-user to access the content.[33]

Fastly supports the UDP-based HTTP/3 protocol, as well as DRM enabled content, encryption and secure tokens to restrict media access.[31][34]

On 8 June 2021, Fastly reported problems with their CDN service which caused many major websites, such as Reddit, gov.uk, Twitch, Spotify and Amazon, along with major news sources such as The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN and the BBC, to become unavailable.[35] It also affected certain parts of other major websites, such as the servers hosting the emojis used by Twitter, resulting in them becoming inaccessible.[36] The outage was resolved by Fastly after a few hours. Fastly has since stated that the cause of the outage was a software bug triggered by a specific user configuration.[37][38]

## References

[edit]

1. ^ "US SEC: Form 10-K Fastly, Inc". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 22 February 2024.
2. ^ "How The New York Times Handled Unprecedented Election-Night Traffic Spike". DataCenter Knowledge. April 18, 2017.
3. ^ a b Kepes, Ben (April 18, 2017). "In the need for speed, Fastly goes all the way to the edge". Computerworld. Archived from the original on April 19, 2017. Retrieved October 10, 2017.
4. ^ "Discontent and disruption in the world of content delivery networks". TechCrunch. June 2017.
5. ^ "The benefits of using Varnish". Fastly.com. 30 March 2015. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
6. ^ "FastlyNetworkCapcity".
7. ^ "Fastly Inc (FSLY) Stock Price & News". Google Finance. Retrieved 2024-07-23.
8. ^ Novet, Jordan (September 16, 2014). "Fastly grabs $40M on its quest to build a big, cool content-delivery network". VentureBeat. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
9. ^ Rockwell, Nick (2018-09-07). "Open Questions: A Conversation with Fastly CEO Artur Bergman". The New York Times. Retrieved 2022-05-30.
10. ^ "Fastly Raises $10M for Content Delivery Network Built for Mobile, Real-Time World". TechCrunch. June 6, 2013. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
11. ^ Richards, Ryan (April 16, 2014). "Ruby on Rails on Fastly". www.fastly.com. Archived from the original on December 23, 2020. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
12. ^ Miller, Ron (September 16, 2014). "Fastly Growing Quickly Snags $40M As VCs Give Generously". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
13. ^ Lardinois, Frederic (August 5, 2015). "Fastly Raises $75M For Its Real-Time CDN". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
14. ^ "Google Partners With CloudFlare, Fastly, Level 3 And Highwinds To Help Developers Push Google Cloud Content To Users Faster". TechCrunch. 9 September 2015.
15. ^ "Fastly Releases Edge Cloud Platform". Bizty.
16. ^ "Fastly raises another $50 million for its content delivery networking technology". TechCrunch. 23 May 2017. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
17. ^ Dillet, Romain (July 17, 2018). "Fastly raises another $40 million before an IPO". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
18. ^ Shieber, Jonathan (April 20, 2019). "Fastly, the content delivery network, files for an IPO". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
19. ^ Novet, Jordan (May 17, 2019). "Fastly shares rocket as much as 60% in IPO debut". CNBC. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
20. ^ Hernbroth, Megan (February 23, 2020). "'I like being in the trenches': Fastly CEO steps down after disappointing market debuts, citing his 'true strengths and passions' as a developer instead of company leader". Business Insider Australia. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
21. ^ Shieber, Jonathan (August 27, 2020). "LA gets a big SaaS exit as Fastly nabs the Culver City-based Signal Sciences for $775M". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
22. ^ "Fastly Appoints Ron Kisling as CFO". www.businesswire.com. 2021-06-29. Retrieved 2021-07-07.
23. ^ Maurer, Mark (2021-06-29). "Cloud-Services Firm Fastly Hires Google Executive as CFO". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2021-07-07.
24. ^ Kastrenakes, Jacob (2022-05-19). "Glitch acquired by cloud service provider Fastly". The Verge. Retrieved 2022-05-20.
25. ^ Robison, Kylie. "$1.3 billion cloud company Fastly is acquiring popular developer startup Glitch in a push to help coders build bigger, better apps". Business Insider. Retrieved 2024-07-23.
26. ^ Narcisi, Gina (2022-08-03). "Cisco Networking And Cloud Leader Todd Nightingale to join Fastly as CEO". CRN. Retrieved 2022-08-03.
27. ^ a b "Fastly acquires Domainr and launches new TLS Certification Authority". SiliconANGLE. 2023-08-17. Retrieved 2023-08-18.
28. ^ Dano, Mike (2024-06-13). "Fastly promises better access to ChatGPT via a new edge API". Light Reading.
29. ^ "Fastly releases global cloud AI accelerator to help developers reduce costs and boost performance". SiliconANGLE. 2024-06-13. Retrieved 2024-06-14.
30. ^ "Fastly network map". Fastly website. 2021-03-31. Retrieved 2021-06-09.
31. ^ a b Williams, Mike (15 February 2021). "Fastly review". TechRadar.
32. ^ "Edge cloud pricing". www.fastly.com. Retrieved 2024-06-14.
33. ^ "How Fastly's CDN Service works". Fastly documentation. 2018-04-24. Retrieved 2021-06-09.
34. ^ Sudia, David (2023-01-05). "How to Get Started with HTTP/3". The New Stack. Retrieved 2023-05-12.
35. ^ Singh, Manish; Dillet, Romain (8 June 2021). "Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit and more go down in Fastly CDN outage". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2021-06-08.
36. ^ "Massive internet outage hits websites including Amazon, gov.uk and Guardian". The Guardian. 2021-06-08. Retrieved 2021-06-08.
37. ^ Rockwell, Nick (2021-06-08). "Summary of June 8 outage". Fastly Blog. Retrieved 2021-06-09.
38. ^ "How One Fastly Customer Broke The Internet". Gizmodo. 9 June 2021. Retrieved 2021-06-13.

## External links

[edit]

* Official website
* Business data for Fastly, Inc.:

* Bloomberg
* Google
* SEC filings
* Yahoo!

* v
* t
* e

Glitch

Products|

* FogBugz (acquired by DevFactory)
* CityDesk (discontinued)

Spin-off companies|

* Stack Exchange (sold to Prosus)
* Trello (sold to Atlassian)

People|

* Joel Spolsky
* Jeff Atwood
* Anil Dash

Parent company|

* Fastly (since 2022)

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