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News


HOW FASTLY THINKS DIFFERENTLY ABOUT CDNS AND THE EDGE




FASTLY IS COUNTING ON ITS DEVELOPER CHOPS AND DIFFERENT APPROACHES TOWARDS
SECURITY AND OTHER AREAS TO COMPETE WITH ITS RIVALS

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By
 * Aaron Tan, TechTarget

Published: 19 Jun 2023 12:45

Fastly may have set up a team to run its Asia-Pacific (APAC) business just under
a year ago, but the company’s founder Artur Bergman believes the content
delivery network (CDN) supplier’s developer roots will give it an edge over
rivals.



Like other CDN players, Fastly has branched out to offer edge compute and
security services to help enterprises speed up and run applications at edge
locations while fending off cyber threats, including distributed denial of
service (DDoS) attacks.

But it thinks differently in those investments, focusing on efforts to scale its
points of presence (POPs) both horizontally and vertically, preventing data
leakages and supporting the WebAssembly language that brings new capabilities
and additional security features to cloud-native developers.

In an interview with Computer Weekly in Singapore, Bergman, who is also Fastly’s
chief architect, discusses the company’s competitive play, its investments in
APAC and new capabilities that customers can expect next year.

Tell us more about Fastly, its focus on developers and how it is competing
against Cloudflare, Akamai and others in the market.

Bergman: We founded the company in 2011, but our story goes back to 2008 when I
was CTO of a company called Wikia, which is now Fandom. We built wikis and we
wanted our wikis to run fast around the world.

The content of wikis doesn’t change very often, but when a user edits a wiki,
the content has to change immediately. We wanted to cache the content at the
edge, but none of the providers could guarantee fast cache invalidation. So, we
ended up building our own small CDN.

In 2011, I left Wikia to start Fastly and Wikia became our anchor customer. The
idea was that we should be flexible enough so that no one should feel the need
to build their own CDN. We should provide enough control to our customers so
that they can treat the edge as their own.

From day one, we also had this dream of delivering full compute at the edge, but
it took us 10 years to get to a point where we had the network and the
technology to be able to deliver a solid compute environment at the edge, which
we did in 2021.

We were developers but our competitors were not developer friendly at all – and
they still kind of aren’t. We wanted to integrate the edge with our application
to get the maximum benefit. We also focused on small files. Back then, CDNs were
either optimised for a few files or large videos, but not billions of small
files like user-generated content. We also went into API [application
programming interface] caching, which was extremely important because most of
those were small files. We built a different architecture to enable that.

> We want to be an amazing platform for people to build applications and
> innovate on the edge. A lot of investments are now going into the compute
> platform and supporting more languages and databases Artur Bergman, Fastly

Our first customers were high-tech customers, but we soon expanded our reach to
publishers who produced segmented or small videos that worked well with our
architecture, notably through request collapsing, a kind of global application
level multicast. So, regardless of the number of requests you get for a new
object, we only go back to the origin once. We also looked at e-commerce which
drove us to invest more in security. That led to the Signal Sciences acquisition
to beef up our security story.

What about the larger enterprise space now that you’ve got a security portfolio
in the fold? What sorts of workloads are enterprises running on your platform?

Bergman: We’ve been in the enterprise space for a long time, and most of our
revenue comes from enterprise customers. It’s been the case for the past seven
years.

Enterprises use us for communications between their end-users or devices and
central systems. End-users can be people, but also IoT [internet of things]
devices that make API calls. The workloads are diverse in what they’re
processing, but it’s fundamentally data that’s going from the cloud or
datacentres to devices and end-users.

Besides caching and serving images, we also host dynamic content which our
customers update using our APIs. In the e-commerce space, this could be caching
information on pricing and availability, so when the price is changed, we’ll
update the cache.

That means your application can be fast around the world. It doesn’t matter
where your datacentre is. The data relevant to the users in a region will be
cached in that region so you get as many interactions as possible, and you don’t
have to go back to the datacentre.

From a security point of view, we took a different path. The worst thing our
customers can do to themselves is have a bug that leaks data between users. To
prevent that, we spin up a sandbox per request and when the request is over, we
tear the sandbox down.

We also ended up investing in the WebAssembly language. We started the Bytecode
Alliance for server side WebAssembly, but we also wanted to support multiple
languages as enterprises have a list of languages they use. That means we’ve had
to reduce the cold startup time. Some of our competitors’ cold startup time is
500ms to one second but ours is 50 microseconds so customers don’t have to worry
about memory safety and the memory guarantee is part of that.

How is Fastly helping customers to mitigate DDoS attacks and doing things
differently when it comes to DDoS mitigation?

Bergman: We do a fair amount of DDoS mitigation, and we use our network to our
advantage. We have powerful machines that can handle large amounts of inbound
traffic, and we have multiple levels where we try to discard or queue bad
traffic. Customers can also tap WAF [web application firewall] functionalities
for higher level application protection.

And so, there are two levels of protection – the first is when there’s so much
traffic that we’re fending off in volumetric attacks and the second is when
you’re trying to defend against, say, a denial of inventory attack, which has
less traffic, so it doesn’t hit the lower level. We have an edge rate limiter
that customers can use to protect against those attacks. We also have managed
security services with a security operations centre that identifies new threats
and tracks what’s going on to protect our customers.

> From a security point of view, we took a different path. The worst thing our
> customers can do to themselves is have a bug that leaks data between users. To
> prevent that, we spin up a sandbox per request and when the request is over,
> we tear the sandbox down Artur Bergman, Fastly

How is Fastly building up its infrastructure footprint in terms of its POPs
across the world? Could you talk about your strategy in that regard?

Bergman: We have a different POP strategy. Having more POPs is not always better
because of the caching ratio and massive data. We also want our POPs to scale
horizontally like everyone else, but we also want our machines to scale
vertically.

Today, we have 99 POPs across 35 countries and our strategy has been to combine
where we think our customers want us to be and where we should be because we
have a lot of traffic in a certain location. We’ve had a POP in Singapore for a
long time, but it primarily serves customers outside Singapore. We also built
POPs in Tokyo and Hong Kong pretty early, as well as Australia and New Zealand.

When we enter a market, we decide – depending on the opportunity and the traffic
– how many POPs we should have and where to place them. We’ve tried to choose
the most connected buildings and locations. The POPs themselves are designed
differently – we have our own SDN [software defined networking] controller. We
use Arista switches that run our own software and it’s a very flat architecture.

And then we have really powerful servers. The current generation servers each
have 400Gbps NICs [network interface cards], a terabyte of RAM, 50TB or so of
SSDs [solid state drives] and 64 cores. Our machines can push a lot of traffic
so it’s really useful in cases of traffic spikes or DDoS attacks. Each
individual machine has all the capacity, but we also have a lot of storage –
some of our biggest POP machines might cache 300 million objects.

Talk to us about your business in the Asia-Pacific region and where you see
opportunities.

Bergman: We’ve had POPs in the region but until recently, we didn’t have a team
here. We were planning to start a team and invest in this region at the end of
2019, then Covid-19 hit so it was impossible to expand to new markets. The team
here was started less than year ago and we now have seven people in various
functions including technical operations, customer support and engineering.
We’ve also added POPs in nine new locations in APAC in the past year and a half,
with significant infrastructure upgrades in Australia and Japan.

From my conversations with potential customers, APAC is a highly connected
market and as customers try to be more global, it’s important that their
applications can scale. We also see a lot of opportunities in countries such as
Indonesia and Malaysia.

You mentioned some of the security capabilities that Fastly had acquired. What
is the thinking around evolving the platform? What sorts of new capabilities are
you looking at?

Bergman: We want to be an amazing platform for people to build applications and
innovate on the edge. A lot of investments are now going into the compute
platform and supporting more languages and databases. We have our global key
value store, and we want to integrate with more data stores.

We also launched our observability capabilities at the end of last year. We have
a privileged view of the internet, and we see so much of the traffic. In the
past, customers use Fastly to see what’s happening and how they’re doing but
they had to do all the work like pull together log files and build their own
dashboards. With observability, we are extending that by collecting more data
and giving our users visibility over what’s happening on their network.

With regard to security, we believe our products have to enable developers and
product engineering teams to deliver features to end-users, and modern security
organisations see themselves as neighbours to allow developers to move faster.
And so, we see the security components of our platform as something that enables
companies to get stuff done.

In November 2022, we also announced a project that lets you spin up Fastly on a
cloud provider or in your on-premise datacentre, giving you access to our
security, compute, observability and caching features no matter where you need
them. There’s been a lot of interest from customers and that’s coming next year.



READ MORE ABOUT CDNS AND EDGE CLOUD

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   momentum in the region and what it is doing to address areas where it can do
   better.
 * Toffs Technologies is eyeing second- and third-tier cities in Asia as it
   bolsters its infrastructure and experiments with the use of home networks as
   content delivery networks.



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