Talk:Fastly

WP:PAID Disclosure
I'm a Fastly employee that has been allowed to create this article on company time so I have added a WP:PAID disclosure; however, my contributions are not at the behest of my employer, and I will cease editing the article directly if/when the article is accepted through the WP:AfC process. --Sykes83 (talk) 22:23, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Competitors section has undue weight
Hola! An editor with undisclosed COI (the CMO of a competitor) added a large competitors list to the page (and for some reason marked it as a minor edit, although I'm not sure why). The content itself seems reasonable, but it now takes up a quarter of the page giving it possibly undue weight. I'm hoping someone might consider reviewing to see if the page would be improved if the list was given less weight. -- Sykes83 (talk) 19:32, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Reply 25-JUN-2018
The question here seems to be whether or not the person adding the information has a conflict of interest, which would require the input of editors at WP:COIN, which is where you should take your concerns. If that editor does have a COI, then their changes should be reviewed. Until that has been ascertained, I'm not sure what else can be done with content that you've described as seeming to be "reasonable". If you have references demonstrating that these are not competitors, then please provide it. That same challenge goes out to the editor who added the information, which I will note in the article with a citation needed template.  spintendo   20:44, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Proposed new section: Acquisitions
I saw someone recently added a Fastly acquisition to the History. I have recently added a list of Acquisitions to the Cloudflare page, perhaps we could also add an acquisitions section here? If anyone is interested to help, please help me compile a list... Signal Sciences, etc. Based on what I have seen on the Salesforce page (using that as a template but open to anything else), we would also want to add the month and year of the acquistiion. Nickgray (talk) 13:46, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

Submitting Acquisitions section draft for review
Hi there! Up front, I should disclose my conflict of interest: I'm a Fastly employee, which is why I'm using the edit request system as opposed to directly editing the company's article myself. In the post above this one, User:Nickgray suggested creating an Acquisitions section. I thought this was a good idea, so I wrote a section draft:

In August 2020, Fastly announced it was acquiring cybersecurity company Signal Sciences for $775 million ($200 million in cash and $575 million in stock). The acquisition was made with the intention of improving Fastly's edge security, as well as the security of its applications and APIs. At the time the purchase was announced, Signal Sciences was protecting approximately 40,000 applications and a trillion production requests per month. Shortly after the announcement was made, Fastly's stock price rose by about seven percent.

Fastly expanded its edge cloud services through the acquisition of Fanout in March 2022. The purchase gave developers using Fastly's edge network the ability to build real-time and streaming APIs with their existing HTTP stack without having to maintain a WebSocket stack.

In May 2022, Fastly announced it had acquired Glitch, a web coding platform with more than 1.8 million developers. Glitch apps were subsequently integrated into Fastly's edge computing services and content delivery network, and Fastly customers were given access to Glitch's development tools. As part of the deal, Glitch CEO Anil Dash joined Fastly as its VP of developer engagement.

In August 2023, it was announced that Fastly had acquired Domainr, a domain search engine. The Domainr API allows developers to instantly check the availability of domain names and monitor them within their own apps and services.

This draft covers all the company's significant acquisitions over the past few years, and explains, wherever possible, what the company Fastly acquired was known for at the time of the purchase and the way(s) that company's assets were integrated into Fastly's operation.

I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I should note that if some form of this draft is approved and an Acquisitions section is added to the article, whoever adds the text will probably also want to delete the brief passages about Signal Sciences, Glitch, and Domainr from the History section. But we can cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, I invite independent editors to review my draft and let me know what they think. Thank you! Jagger at Fastly (talk) 19:20, 18 April 2024 (UTC)


 * I'm going to ping User:QuietCicada, since they recently made a helpful edit to the article. I want to be clear: no obligation on your part, Cicada. I know you're editing on your own time. Just checking to see if you'd like to review this request. Thanks! Jagger at Fastly (talk) 19:43, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
 * , I honestly hate having acquisition sections. The information is better formatted under history, creating subheadings based on years if necessary. Let me know if you would like me to take a closer look as I would be glad to clean up and implement what can be done. --CNMall41 (talk) 04:02, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Hey User:CNMall41, this is very helpful feedback. I think I've got an idea about what to do, but it'll take a bit of work on my end. I'll be back once that's done. Thank you for getting involved and talk soon. Jagger at Fastly (talk) 20:26, 15 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Returning to this thread to propose a full History section revision, which contains a subsection for Acquisitions, which I believe is a good idea because there are quite a few of them. (But I'm open to changing that, if editors think there's a better way!) In addition to gathering the acquisitions under their own heading, I've done some light reorganizing and added information about a few notable events in the company's history.


 * This draft is lengthy, so to make things a little easier for editors, I'm going to use the comparison function. Click the dropdown below to see my History draft contrasted against the current section:

{{textdiff|Fastly was founded in 2011 by the Swedish-American entrepreneur Artur Bergman, previously chief technical officer at Wikia (now Fandom). In June 2013, Fastly raised $10 million in Series B funding. In April 2014, the company announced that it had acquired CDN Sumo, a CDN add-on for Heroku. In September 2014, Fastly raised a further $40 million in Series C funding, followed by a $75 million Series D round in August 2015.

In September 2015, Google partnered with Fastly and other content delivery network providers to offer services to its users. In April 2017, Fastly launched its edge cloud platform along with image optimization, load balancing, and a web application firewall.

Fastly raised $50 million in funding in April 2017, and another $40 million in July 2018. The company filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in April 2019 and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17, 2019. In February 2020, Bergman stepped down as CEO and assumed the role of chief architect and executive chairperson; Joshua Bixby took over the CEO role.

In August 2020, Fastly announced it was acquiring cybersecurity company Signal Sciences for $775 million ($200 million in cash and $575 million in stock).

In June 2021, Ronald W. Kisling, previously employed by Alphabet as the CFO of the Fitbit division, was hired to serve as Fastly's CFO, succeeding Adriel Lares. He assumed the position in August 2021.

In May 2022, Fastly announced it had acquired Glitch, a web coding platform with more than 1.8 million developers.

In August 2022, Todd Nightingale, previously employed by Cisco as Executive Vice President of Enterprise Networking and Cloud business, was hired to serve as Fastly's CEO, succeeding Joshua Bixby.

In August 2023, it was announced Fastly has acquired the domain status API provider, Domainr. |Fastly was founded in 2011 by the Swedish-American entrepreneur Artur Bergman, previously chief technical officer at Wikia. In June 2013, Fastly raised $10 million in Series B funding. In September 2014, Fastly raised a further $40 million in Series C funding, followed by a $75 million Series D round in August 2015.

In September 2015, Google partnered with Fastly and other content delivery network providers to offer services to its users. In April 2017, Fastly launched its edge cloud platform along with image optimization, load balancing, and a web application firewall.

Fastly raised $50 million in funding in April 2017, and another $40 million in July 2018. The company filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in April 2019 and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17, 2019. In February 2020, Bergman stepped down as CEO and assumed the role of chief architect and executive chairperson; Joshua Bixby took over the CEO role.

In June 2021, Ronald W. Kisling, previously employed by Alphabet as the CFO of the Fitbit division, was hired to serve as Fastly's CFO, succeeding Adriel Lares. He assumed the position in August 2021.

In August 2022, Todd Nightingale, previously employed by Cisco as Executive Vice President of Enterprise Networking and Cloud business, was hired to serve as Fastly's CEO, succeeding Joshua Bixby. That same year, Fastly worked with Apple and Google to create private access tokens meant to replace CAPTCHA as a method for apps and websites to differentiate human users from bots. In March 2023, Fastly won a contract to develop an oblivious HTTP relay intended to help Google serve ads to users without the use of third-party cookies.

Fastly has been involved in several efforts to support open source projects and internet infrastructure. In 2019, the company co-founded the Bytecode Alliance alongside Mozilla, Red Hat, and Intel. This group is a non-profit that seeks to expand the utility and security of WebAssembly. In April 2021, Fastly joined the MACH Alliance, which promotes the use of open IT ecosystems. In November 2022, the company launched its Fast Foward initiative. Through this initiative, it committed $50 million in free services toward the development of open source projects such as the H2O web server.

Acquisitions
In August 2020, Fastly announced it was acquiring cybersecurity company Signal Sciences for $775 million ($200 million in cash and $575 million in stock). The acquisition was made with the intention of improving Fastly's edge security, as well as the security of its applications and APIs. At the time the purchase was announced, Signal Sciences was protecting approximately 40,000 applications and a trillion production requests per month. Shortly after the announcement was made, Fastly's stock price rose by about seven percent.

Fastly expanded its edge cloud services through the acquisition of Fanout in March 2022. The purchase gave developers using Fastly's edge network the ability to build real-time and streaming APIs with their existing HTTP stack without having to maintain a WebSocket stack.

In May 2022, Fastly announced it had acquired Glitch, a web coding platform with more than 1.8 million developers. Glitch apps were subsequently integrated into Fastly's edge computing services and content delivery network, and Fastly customers were given access to Glitch's development tools. As part of the deal, Glitch CEO Anil Dash joined Fastly as its VP of developer engagement.

In August 2023, it was announced that Fastly had acquired Domainr, a domain search engine. The Domainr API allows developers to instantly check the availability of domain names and monitor them within their own apps and services. }}


 * Here is what the History would look like if my draft were accepted with no alterations:

Fastly was founded in 2011 by the Swedish-American entrepreneur Artur Bergman, previously chief technical officer at Wikia. In June 2013, Fastly raised $10 million in Series B funding. In September 2014, Fastly raised a further $40 million in Series C funding, followed by a $75 million Series D round in August 2015.

In September 2015, Google partnered with Fastly and other content delivery network providers to offer services to its users. In April 2017, Fastly launched its edge cloud platform along with image optimization, load balancing, and a web application firewall.

Fastly raised $50 million in funding in April 2017, and another $40 million in July 2018. The company filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in April 2019 and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17, 2019. In February 2020, Bergman stepped down as CEO and assumed the role of chief architect and executive chairperson; Joshua Bixby took over the CEO role.

In June 2021, Ronald W. Kisling, previously employed by Alphabet as the CFO of the Fitbit division, was hired to serve as Fastly's CFO, succeeding Adriel Lares. He assumed the position in August 2021.

In August 2022, Todd Nightingale, previously employed by Cisco as Executive Vice President of Enterprise Networking and Cloud business, was hired to serve as Fastly's CEO, succeeding Joshua Bixby. That same year, Fastly worked with Apple and Google to create private access tokens meant to replace CAPTCHA as a method for apps and websites to differentiate human users from bots. In March 2023, Fastly won a contract to develop an oblivious HTTP relay intended to help Google serve ads to users without the use of third-party cookies.

Fastly has been involved in several efforts to support open source projects and internet infrastructure. In 2019, the company co-founded the Bytecode Alliance alongside Mozilla, Red Hat, and Intel. This group is a non-profit that seeks to expand the utility and security of WebAssembly. In April 2021, Fastly joined the MACH Alliance, which promotes the use of open IT ecosystems. In November 2022, the company launched its Fast Foward initiative. Through this initiative, it committed $50 million in free services toward the development of open source projects such as the H2O web server.

Acquisitions
In August 2020, Fastly announced it was acquiring cybersecurity company Signal Sciences for $775 million ($200 million in cash and $575 million in stock). The acquisition was made with the intention of improving Fastly's edge security, as well as the security of its applications and APIs. At the time the purchase was announced, Signal Sciences was protecting approximately 40,000 applications and a trillion production requests per month. Shortly after the announcement was made, Fastly's stock price rose by about seven percent.

Fastly expanded its edge cloud services through the acquisition of Fanout in March 2022. The purchase gave developers using Fastly's edge network the ability to build real-time and streaming APIs with their existing HTTP stack without having to maintain a WebSocket stack.

In May 2022, Fastly announced it had acquired Glitch, a web coding platform with more than 1.8 million developers. Glitch apps were subsequently integrated into Fastly's edge computing services and content delivery network, and Fastly customers were given access to Glitch's development tools. As part of the deal, Glitch CEO Anil Dash joined Fastly as its VP of developer engagement.

In August 2023, it was announced that Fastly had acquired Domainr, a domain search engine. The Domainr API allows developers to instantly check the availability of domain names and monitor them within their own apps and services.


 * I invite User:CNMall41 to take a look at this; I hope it's more in line with their thinking about how the article should be structured. Other independent editors may jump in as well. Thank you! Jagger at Fastly (talk) 19:27, 22 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Per a chat I just had with User:CNMall41 on their user Talk page, I'm going to revise my proposal further, unifying the whole History section and sprinkling the acquisitions wherever they fit in chronologically. Here's a comparison of the current History vs. my draft:


 * And here's what my draft would look like if it were added to the article without any changes:

Fastly was founded in 2011 by the Swedish-American entrepreneur Artur Bergman, previously chief technical officer at Wikia. In June 2013, Fastly raised $10 million in Series B funding. In September 2014, Fastly raised a further $40 million in Series C funding, followed by a $75 million Series D round in August 2015.

In September 2015, Google partnered with Fastly and other content delivery network providers to offer services to its users. In April 2017, Fastly launched its edge cloud platform along with image optimization, load balancing, and a web application firewall.

Fastly raised $50 million in funding in April 2017, and another $40 million in July 2018. The company filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in April 2019 and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17, 2019. In February 2020, Bergman stepped down as CEO and assumed the role of chief architect and executive chairperson; Joshua Bixby took over the CEO role.

In August 2020, Fastly announced it was acquiring cybersecurity company Signal Sciences for $775 million ($200 million in cash and $575 million in stock). The acquisition was made with the intention of improving Fastly's edge security, as well as the security of its applications and APIs. At the time the purchase was announced, Signal Sciences was protecting approximately 40,000 applications and a trillion production requests per month. Shortly after the announcement was made, Fastly's stock price rose by about seven percent.

In June 2021, Ronald W. Kisling, previously employed by Alphabet as the CFO of the Fitbit division, was hired to serve as Fastly's CFO, succeeding Adriel Lares. He assumed the position in August 2021.

Fastly expanded its edge cloud services through the acquisition of Fanout in March 2022. The purchase gave developers using Fastly's edge network the ability to build real-time and streaming APIs with their existing HTTP stack without having to maintain a WebSocket stack. In May 2022, Fastly announced it had acquired Glitch, a web coding platform with more than 1.8 million developers. Glitch apps were subsequently integrated into Fastly's edge computing services and content delivery network, and Fastly customers were given access to Glitch's development tools. As part of the deal, Glitch CEO Anil Dash joined Fastly as its VP of developer engagement.

In August 2022, Todd Nightingale, previously employed by Cisco as Executive Vice President of Enterprise Networking and Cloud business, was hired to serve as Fastly's CEO, succeeding Joshua Bixby. That same year, Fastly worked with Apple and Google to create private access tokens meant to replace CAPTCHA as a method for apps and websites to differentiate human users from bots.

In March 2023, Fastly won a contract to develop an oblivious HTTP relay intended to help Google serve ads to users without the use of third-party cookies. In August of the same year, it was announced that Fastly had acquired Domainr, a domain search engine. The Domainr API allows developers to instantly check the availability of domain names and monitor them within their own apps and services.

Fastly has been involved in several efforts to support open source projects and internet infrastructure. In 2019, the company co-founded the Bytecode Alliance alongside Mozilla, Red Hat, and Intel. This group is a non-profit that seeks to expand the utility and security of WebAssembly. In April 2021, Fastly joined the MACH Alliance, which promotes the use of open IT ecosystems. In November 2022, the company launched its Fast Foward initiative. Through this initiative, it committed $50 million in free services toward the development of open source projects such as the H2O web server.


 * Alright, I think this draft is in a good place now, but it's obviously not up to me to decide. If anybody has feedback or further thoughts, please let me know! Thank you, Jagger at Fastly (talk) 22:57, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Submitting Operation section draft for editor review
Hello again! It seems like my request above has stalled since I last revised it. I worry that it's gotten a little too complicated for new editors to wrap their heads around. So I'm going to leave it be for a bit and move ahead by proposing a few updates to the Operation section. There are some new aspects of the company's services that aren't currently covered in this section, so I did some research and did my best to substantiate new claims. I also sought to fix some existing sourcing issues by trimming content and locating a handful of new reliable sources. Below, you can see the current section vs. my draft:

And here is what the section would look like if all my suggested edits were made:

Fastly's CDN service follows the reverse proxy model, routing all website traffic through their own servers instead of providing a 'cdn.mydomain.com' address to store site-specific files. It then fetches content from the point of presence nearest to the location of the requesting user. Content is not directly uploaded to their servers, rather it is pulled periodically from the origin server and cached in order to reduce the time required for an end-user to access the content. Fastly uses artificial intelligence to improve the rate at which content is delivered by its network.

Fastly supports the UDP-based HTTP/3 protocol, as well as DRM enabled content, encryption and secure tokens to restrict media access.

On 8 June 2021, Fastly reported problems with their CDN service which caused many major websites, such as Reddit, gov.uk, Twitch, Spotify and Amazon, along with major news sources such as The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN and the BBC, to become unavailable. It also affected certain parts of other major websites, such as the servers hosting the emojis used by Twitter, resulting in them becoming inaccessible. The outage was resolved by Fastly after a few hours. Fastly reported that the cause of the outage was a software bug triggered by a specific user configuration. Fastly has since stated that it has enacted several resiliency and redundancy efforts intended to protect against future outages.

In November 2022, the company expanded its offering of edge observability tools. These tools allow Fastly users to organize real-time and historical data to gauge the function of their edge computing networks. In March 2023, Fastly made all of its network services and web application security products available to its partners. Previously, some of the company's partners had only been able to sell specific Fastly products, such as its web application firewall.

As ever, I'm happy to discuss my proposed edits with independent editors and adjust the copy above as needed. Thanks! Jagger at Fastly (talk) 20:48, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
 * The MarketBeat analysis feels like a regurgitation of the Fastly earnings call, I would avoid using this source.
 * The 2021 outage seems to be given undue weight, compare with Amazon Web Services. I don't think paring this down would be biased towards Fastly.
 * The last paragraph on edge observability and channel partner programs doesn't belong on Wikipedia. Please consider if the majority of our readers are interested in the availability of Fastly products to channel partners or even can comprehend that sentence. Brandon (talk) 23:50, 6 July 2024 (UTC)


 * Hey, User:Brandon! Based on your feedback, I've made a few adjustments to the draft. I replaced the MarketBeat article with a Silicon Angle one that I hope is a little stronger. I also trimmed the outage paragraph slightly. In the last paragraph, I got rid of the edge observability sentence but kept the passage about Fastly's partner program. This was a rather significant expansion of our services and I think it's written in a way that's legible to a general audience. Your mileage may vary, though.


 * Here's the revised section draft:

Fastly's CDN service follows the reverse proxy model, routing all website traffic through their own servers instead of providing a 'cdn.mydomain.com' address to store site-specific files. It then fetches content from the point of presence nearest to the location of the requesting user. Content is not directly uploaded to their servers, rather it is pulled periodically from the origin server and cached in order to reduce the time required for an end-user to access the content. Fastly uses artificial intelligence to improve the rate at which content is delivered by its network.

Fastly supports the UDP-based HTTP/3 protocol, as well as DRM enabled content, encryption and secure tokens to restrict media access.

On 8 June 2021, Fastly reported problems with their CDN service which caused many major websites, such as Reddit, gov.uk, and Amazon, along with major news sources such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and the BBC, to become unavailable. The outage was resolved by Fastly after a few hours. Fastly reported that the cause of the outage was a software bug triggered by a specific user configuration. Fastly has since stated that it has enacted several resiliency and redundancy efforts intended to protect against future outages.

In March 2023, Fastly made all of its network services and web application security products available to its partners. Previously, some of the company's partners had only been able to sell specific Fastly products, such as its web application firewall.


 * Really appreciate your help with this. If you've got additional thoughts, please let me know! Jagger at Fastly (talk) 00:23, 9 July 2024 (UTC)