Fastly

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of engineering for IGN, a video game publisher. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Fastly?

We wanted Fastly to serve as a content delivery network (CDN) for quick-serving our HTML and site assets like CSS, images, and JavaScript. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

They’re our CDN, so they serve our content. They have multiple points of presence across the world and serve our content to users in different locales. Their main service is around the speed of delivering our web pages and apps. They also offer some protection over distributed denial-of-service and high caching of all of our content. 

What is the team composition?

We have an account executive and a post-sales support engineer, but we mainly use their APIs as a plug-and-play service. 

How did you come to work with Fastly?

I’m not sure how we originally found them, since that predates me. However, we were using someone else as our CDN, but Fastly was a new competitor in town, so we gave them a shot. They ended up being cheaper and better.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $1 million on their services. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working with them since around January 2015. 

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We measure uptime of the website, which is near 100% thanks to Fastly. If they detect an error when fetching it from its original, they can use the last cached version instead of giving an error to the user, which helps. The speed checks show good metrics for Fastly, too. 

How did Fastly perform from a project management standpoint?

They perform very well in terms of communicating and being responsive. We have regular weekly meetings with them in case anything comes up. Their account executives and representatives are always really quick and communicative. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their whole CDN is completely configurable; they use Varnish as their backend technology which comes with its own configuration language. Because of this, we can tune the service to do just about anything we want it to do, which is way different than a normal CDN, which is more plug-and-play. Fastly is just infinitely configurable. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

We push them on price, but they do everything pretty well — we’ve been very happy with them. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Read the documentation pretty thoroughly. The post-sales support that they offer is well worth the money to help you tweak everything the way you want it.