Fastly

Fastly is an American technology company that develops a global Edge Cloud Platform for the fast and secure delivery of websites, applications, APIs, and digital content.

The platform combines a Content Delivery Network (CDN), Web Application & API Protection (WAAP), DDoS Protection, Bot Management, API Security, Edge Computing, and Real-Time Observability. Traffic is processed across a global edge infrastructure as close as possible to the end user.

Fastly’s solutions enable organizations to:

• accelerate websites, applications, and APIs;
• improve the availability of digital services;
• reduce the load on origin infrastructure;
• protect applications and APIs from web attacks;
• defend against DDoS attacks and malicious bots;
• execute business logic directly at the edge;
• obtain real-time data on performance, traffic, and security events;
• integrate delivery, security, and compute into DevOps and DevSecOps processes.

Fastly’s global network has a total connected capacity of 622 Tbit/s and processes more than 5 trillion requests per day.

Fastly’s Key Technologies

1. Network Services and Programmable CDN

• Provides global content delivery and caching with flexible control over requests, caching policies, and traffic routing.
• The programmable architecture allows organizations to quickly modify edge platform configurations and manage CDN behavior.
• Instant Purge technology enables near-instant removal of stale content from the global cache, while Real-Time Logging provides real-time visibility into traffic and application performance.

Key objectives: accelerating websites and applications, delivering static and dynamic content, streaming delivery, optimizing images, reducing the load on origin infrastructure, and improving service availability.

2. Next-Gen WAF — Web Application and API Protection

Provides protection for web applications, APIs, and microservices regardless of where they are deployed.

The solution protects against OWASP Top 10 threats, credential stuffing, account takeover, API abuse, and other types of malicious activity.

SmartParse technology analyzes incoming requests and identifies malicious payloads, while the Network Learning Exchange (NLX) uses threat data to improve the identification of potentially malicious sources.

Various deployment options are supported, including Fastly Edge Cloud, Cloud WAF, On-Prem WAF, and supported PaaS environments. The Next-Gen WAF can be used independently of Fastly CDN.

3. API Security

Provides API discovery, monitoring, and protection against attacks and unauthorized use.

The solution helps identify public, private, and shadow APIs, monitor endpoints and methods, and detect anomalous behavior.

It supports modern APIs, including REST, GraphQL, SOAP, gRPC, and WebSockets.

4. DDoS Protection

Provides automatic detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks targeting network infrastructure, web applications, and APIs.

Fastly’s global edge network filters malicious traffic before it reaches the customer’s infrastructure and can absorb significant traffic spikes.

Protection covers both network-level and application-level attacks.

5. Bot Management and AI Bot Management

Enables organizations to distinguish legitimate users and beneficial automated traffic from malicious bots.

The solution protects against credential stuffing, scraping, automated API abuse, and other bot-driven attacks.

AI Bot Management enables organizations to identify and control AI crawlers and other automated systems accessing web content.

6. Client-Side Protection

Provides protection for the client side of web applications and monitors the activity of third-party scripts running in the user’s browser.

The solution helps identify threats that may remain undetected by traditional server-side security controls.

7. Edge Compute

A serverless platform for executing code directly on Fastly’s edge infrastructure.

It enables organizations to move data processing and business logic closer to the user, reducing latency and the load on central infrastructure.

The technology is built on WebAssembly (Wasm) and is suitable for edge applications, microservices, API gateway logic, personalization, and authentication/authorization scenarios.

8. Real-Time Observability

Provides real-time observability for monitoring the performance, traffic, and security of digital services.

Supports real-time metrics, dashboards, alerts, and log forwarding to external SIEM, observability, and analytics systems.

This helps SRE, DevOps, and security teams identify and analyze issues and incidents more quickly.

Why Choose Fastly?

• A unified Edge Cloud Platform. CDN, security, compute, and observability all run on a shared infrastructure.
• High performance. Global connected network capacity: 622 Tbit/s.
• Programmability. Flexible control over content delivery and logic execution directly at the edge.
• Comprehensive protection. Next-Gen WAF, API Security, DDoS Protection, Bot Management, and Client-Side Protection.
• Flexible WAF deployment. Edge, cloud, on-premises, and supported PaaS environments.
• Real-Time Visibility. Metrics and logs for monitoring performance and security.
• Developer-first approach. APIs, CLI, SDK, Terraform, and integrations with modern development and automation workflows.