Since its founding in 2011 as a Content Delivery Network (CDN), Fastly has scaled rapidly into an edge cloud platform that serves more than 10% of all Internet requests (up to 400 billion a day), powering the systems behind Spotify (music streaming), various global news sites (The New York Times, The Guardian), AirBnB (travel), charitable giving (Kickstarter, Doctors without Borders), open source and software development (RubyGems, PyPi, OpenSSH, GitHub).
Fastly is one of the top ten fastest growing B2B tech companies within the last thirty years. Over the last year alone, the tech company saw its momentum ramp up significantly as it increased network traffic by 70% and requests served by 90%. 2017 Deloitte Fast 500 listed Fastly as one of the most rapidly growing companies in the United States, along with its partners and customers.
In the last three years, Fastly has seen its customer base triple and increased its network capacity by a staggering 775%. It has also seen its customer usage double as increasing numbers of users utilize Fastly’s edge cloud platform. It has also grown the free open source traffic it supports by up to 3,000%.
In a recent blog post, Fastly CEO and founder, Artur Bergman, commented, “We look forward to supporting our customers’ continued growth — and ability to offer fast, secure, and scalable online experiences — in the years ahead. In the meantime, we’ll keep pushing more and more to the edge… {to] help build a better, faster Internet.”
Accompanying all the rapid growth, Fastly has now expanded its geographic reach, with offices in six sites worldwide and tripled its number of global employees (over 50% of staff now work outside San Francisco).
In another recent blog, Fastly’s VP of Infrastructure, Tom Daly, announced that Fastly had added its 40th point of presence (POP) to its global network in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in addition to new POPs in Johannesburg, South Africa and four US cities: Newark, Chicago, Ashburn and Los Angeles.
Over the first half of 2017, Fastly concentrated on expanding its US network, launching “Project Doughnut” to design a new kind of modular POP that utilizes 100G Ethernet technology to meet the demands of its rapidly growing consumer base. The new designs of the POPs incorporate 25G Ethernet connections (from a previous 10G) to the cache server, allowing the platform to scale up from 40G to 100G per cache. The POPs are also using more port-dense network switches, which means the number of cache servers can be doubled. The goal is to add network capacity and meet the increased request processing capacity.
Fastly aims at being one of the most accessible interconnections networks globally. Networks can connect to Fastly at 42 internet exchange points (IXPs) across locations and mediums via an IXP or a direct cross connect.
As of writing, Fastly has 17.4 Tbps of connected global capacity in data – the equivalent of 14 billion text messages sent simultaneously. The adoption of the 100G Ethernet technology along with port-dense 5 Tbps switching platforms means that Fastly can continue to scale rapidly. Watch this space.