Fastly appears across 19 articles to date.
Who is Fastly?
Fastly is a cloud-based edge computing and content delivery platform that provides programmable Content Delivery Network (CDN), security, and networking services for digital applications.
- Edge cloud platform for content delivery, compute, and networking
- CDN and caching services for web and Application Programming Interface (API) traffic
- Application and API protection services (security)
- Edge computing and programmable edge logic for custom traffic handling
- Traffic observability, performance monitoring, and developer-centric tooling
Show more
More About Fastly
Fastly operates an edge cloud platform that combines content delivery, security, and compute services close to end users, targeting organizations that run web, mobile, streaming, and API-centric applications at scale.
The company’s core offering is its CDN (content delivery), which caches static and dynamic content at edge locations to reduce latency and offload origin infrastructure. Enterprises use Fastly’s CDN to serve websites, media assets, APIs, and software updates, with configuration typically managed via versioned services and edge configuration rules.
Fastly also provides application and API protection services (security), including Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities and protections against common web threats. These security services integrate with its edge delivery stack, allowing inspection and enforcement at the edge before traffic reaches customer origins. Enterprises use these controls to implement security policies aligned with compliance and risk requirements.
In addition, Fastly offers edge compute capabilities (edge computing), enabling customers to run custom logic on its edge network. These services support use cases such as request and response manipulation, personalized content, routing decisions, authentication flows, and A/B testing. The platform is oriented toward modern application architectures that rely on APIs, microservices, and distributed backends.
Fastly’s platform makes use of standard internet protocols and technologies, including HTTP/HTTPS, Transport Layer Security (TLS), Domain Name System (DNS), IPv4/IPv6, and modern caching semantics. Configuration and automation are accessible via APIs, command-line tools, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) workflows, which fit into DevOps and Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) practices used by enterprise development and operations teams.
The company provides observability and analytics features (observability) that expose real-time and historical metrics about traffic, cache performance, and security events. These capabilities help operations teams monitor service health, tune cache policies, and troubleshoot application behavior at the edge.
From a marketplace taxonomy perspective, Fastly can be categorized across several domains: CDN, web and application security (security), edge computing and edge cloud (edge computing), and network performance optimization (networking and performance). Its offerings are positioned for enterprises that require programmable, API-accessible edge services to support high-traffic, latency-sensitive, or globally distributed applications.
Our description of Fastly. Updated December 2025.
