What is our primary use case?
We're using it as the primary content delivery network for a large number of websites that we're responsible for, and we're using it in a configuration of an edge and a shield in front of our organization.
And we use it in our deployed pipeline. So everything is configuration, is code. We use their VCL technology quite extensively for the functionality of the Edge behavior.
How has it helped my organization?
Fastly's instant purging feature improved our content monitoring processes. One of the differences between CloudFront and Fastly is the time to purge.
So, Fastly's time to purge is very quick. And we've automated it with some front-end API calls. We've even integrated it with Slack so that we can push that clearing of content to a Telstra approach. So the content developer or the person who has the issue with the stale content can actually be empowered to clear their own cache without having to go through someone with the appropriate permissions. So, the fact that we can expose that with API calls is pretty good.
Moreover, I can see service history and service metrics. So, it's mostly metrics and historical data. For example, how many times do specific properties have the highest rate of, say, 500 errors or something?
Moreover, Fastly helps our company manage a traffic spike during some high-traffic attempts if we have any.
Fastly's request collapsing is their secret sauce, and you get that with Varnish. That's really their massive value proposition, and that they in high traffic spike, even if we have our caching configuration low, it still protects our origin from a big traffic stop because we only get, like, one request coming in. Because that's what they do. They collapse the request such that we might get a thousand people asking for the same piece of data that's not in the cache, but they don't come at us with a thousand requests, the origin. They send one request to the origin and then wait for it to come back, and then they populate the sibling characters with that answer. So it's a sort of table state functionality that they provide that is really key to their value proposition.
What is most valuable?
Its VCL is very powerful, and the fact that we can interface with a deployed pipeline for the configuration as code is really great. So we don't have to do things with their web interface. Everything can be done programmatically as opposed to by hand.
Fastly is very stable, reliable, and fast. And when Fastly does its technology upgrades, it does a good job.
What needs improvement?
Stronger analytics would be helpful like showing configurations that haven't served a certain amount of traffic in a while. With many properties, things can get lost track of - duplicates or unused configurations not properly decommissioned.
It doesn't show the number of properties where a configuration change happened within a specific timeframe, or there's some options. There's a lot in that area where things could be improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it for six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We never faced any crashes, downtimes, or lagging. Fastly manages its infrastructure really well.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Fastly is very scalable. We haven't had any issues. Our on-prem one, which was one of the concerns, is we, again, can only scale to what you installed as hardware, and we did have some issues a few times with the maximum capacity that it could handle.
So, in our case, it was connections to origin, when we did have a problem.
How are customer service and support?
Support is good; the product works as advertised. We have a Slack connection with them. So we can basically ask for help, live, engage, and ring when they respond. Very quickly.
From the acknowledgment point of view, sometimes it takes a little while to get it to the right place. But a lot of time, just for the nature of the types of things we're asking for, we generally don't ask for Trivial support.
So a lot of the times when we ask for something, it's not hitting tier one or tier two anyway because it's inappropriate for them. So, a lot of times, when we ask something, it ends up needing to be escalated regardless because it'll be of a significant technical nature.
So sometimes you take a little while to get to it. But it's not that it would be unexpected; I have to wait to get it sent to the proper owner.
Moreover, the responses and they answer their questions with good answers, and they don't, like, we don't get that typical BS right around where they just ask us stupid question questions that could make us wait.
They're gonna put that clear up in and ask relevant questions, and they're actually really good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
The GUI is easy enough if you're a small company; the initial setup would be fine. It took us a little while to get our deploy pipeline the way we wanted it to be automatic so that individuals don't have to do the configuration. It comes along with our application deployment.
So, if we're small, it's fine. The GUI is adequate and intuitive enough, and then as you grow and expand and evolve, you obviously wanna go towards using their API to deliver your configuration changes.
In our case, we deployed both on the prem version as well as the cloud. At one time, we did an on-prem version. We got rid of it because the value proposition wasn't there for the cost. We've now gone completely with their hosted infrastructure. Like, we don't do anything on-prem anymore.
We were like, we were very few companies that did the on-prem. But it was last year; we got rid of it because it wasn't something we needed to continue with.
The deployment process was a while back. It was fine. Fastly was very good at what it did.
Deploying something like that is nontrivial because you gotta coordinate hardware installs and circuits when things like that.
What about the implementation team?
We have a good team for the deployment process. We had three or four people on that team that were on that project.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing has been very competitive.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend reading up on the core functionality of the product and then mapping that to your business use case. And, particularly, cache keys are things you wanna look at. Your cache keys are well thought out so that you don't have something too specific, and you also don't want something too general.
We've had that problem in the past where our cache keys aren't specific enough or are too general, so we go to clear cache, and we're clearing more things than we should.
Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten because I like this product.