Fastly’s genesis may have been inspired by the content delivery network (CDN) landscape in 2011, but its trajectory over the past decade tells a bigger story: a transformation into a programmable edge platform that matches today’s expectations for internet-based services and content.
Speaking with Kelly Shortridge, Chief Product Officer, she shared how Fastly set out in 2011 to solve the initial problem of legacy CDN experiences – a straightforward but painful challenge of getting content updated and delivered over the public internet in a way that was quick and responsive.
At the time, CDN solutions were typified by incumbents like Akamai. Kelly described a hypothetical scenario of a newspaper needing to update its headlines: “Akamai required you to call up a human to change that content. It’s not very efficient, and it doesn’t work for breaking news.”
“Fastly instead allowed newspapers, and many other customers, to use an API to make those changes,” Kelly explained, adding that the underlying technology, called instant purge, now forms the basis of Fastly’s global network.
This technology, according to Kelly, is what differentiates Fastly from its competitors, as it allows the company to move more quickly and innovate even more with software.
Tying it all back to customer success
Fastly’s founders were Akamai customers who were dissatisfied and simply wanted a better way to serve content on the World Wide Web.
Fifteen years later, with Kelly as Chief Product Officer, the company has crystallised a single mission: to help its customers’ software succeed on the public internet in the way their businesses need it to.
“Ultimately, that is what they are trying to solve as they develop software to run on the internet to achieve business outcomes – for example, a retail website for eCommerce, an investment management portal, or an internal dashboard for field workers at a mining company.”
Many moving parts are involved in achieving these business outcomes, which Fastly has identified and grouped into four general “buckets”: CDN, security, compute, and observability.
Kelly explained, “It’s so many different things because we want to provide the same consolidated platform for customers to solve all of those connected problems, towards that goal of ensuring their software is working the way the business wants and needs it to.”
Security as lubricant, not quicksand
Customer demand pulled Fastly into new domains – streaming, security, and eventually compute at the edge. With financial services customers, Fastly found itself expanding into security products, which Kelly said offered differentiation through APIs.
“Security is often seen as something that slows down the business. Instead, if you can interact with application security via an API, then your software engineers barely have to think about security and can manage security configurations the same way they manage performance, acceleration, and personalisation.”
When security becomes part of normal workflow and DevOps practices, rather than an afterthought, it becomes a powerful enabler. In essence, developers can keep shipping code because the platform handles much of the protection.
Fastly prides itself on already working with tools that developers care about, which means they do not need to leave their terminals or existing workflows. Less context switching leads to faster iteration and fewer friction points.
Kelly also pointed out that security teams and platform engineering teams can use the same tooling to achieve shared outcomes. “So, we actually dissolve some silos in our enterprise customer environments.”
Modern and programmable edge
“No matter the industry, every company now, to some extent, is a software company – they are having to achieve their goals with software and by building software,” said Kelly.
Fastly also quietly armed its edge for speed by backing SSD‑powered points of presence (PoPs) instead of legacy spinning disks. This gave its platform a speed advantage, in addition to AI-driven protection and performance baked into the hardware.
“We have actually built a compute platform where you can run workloads, functions, and applications within our services that constitute what we call the edge. Here, Fastly realised it can give its customers the ability to innovate more quickly and push more of their code closer to the end user.”
As Kelly explained, the existing network also became the launchpad for a modern programmable platform – a global infrastructure that can quickly deliver content at scale for international organisations.
Because of how core it is to businesses, customers treat it as their own critical infrastructure, according to Kelly.
“We take a lot of pride in that.”
