Fastly

Last updated
Fastly, Inc.
Company type Public
Industry Internet
FoundedMarch 2011;13 years ago (2011-03)
FounderArtur Bergman
Headquarters San Francisco, California, U.S.
Key people
Services
RevenueIncrease2.svg US$506 million (2023)
Increase Negative.svgUS$−198 million (2023)
Increase Negative.svgUS$−133 million (2023)
Total assets Decrease2.svgUS$1.53 billion (2023)
Total equity Increase2.svgUS$979 million (2023)
Number of employees
1,207 (2023)
ASN
Website www.fastly.com OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Footnotes /references
[1]

Fastly, Inc. is an American cloud computing services provider based in San Francisco. [2] Fastly provides content delivery network services, cloud computing, cloud security, image optimization, and load balancing services. [3] Fastly's cloud security services include denial-of-service attack protection, bot mitigation, and a web application firewall. [4]

Contents

The Fastly platform is built on top of Varnish. [5] As of March 2024, Fastly transfers 336 Tbps of data. [6] [7] [ better source needed ]

History

Fastly was founded in 2011 by the Swedish-American entrepreneur Artur Bergman, previously chief technical officer at Wikia (now Fandom). [8] [9] In June 2013, Fastly raised $10 million in Series B funding. [10] In April 2014, the company announced that it had acquired CDN Sumo, a CDN add-on for Heroku. [11] In September 2014, Fastly raised a further $40 million in Series C funding, [12] followed by a $75 million Series D round in August 2015. [13]

In September 2015, Google partnered with Fastly and other content delivery network providers to offer services to its users. [14] In April 2017, Fastly launched its edge cloud platform along with image optimization, load balancing, and a web application firewall. [3] [15]

Fastly raised $50 million in funding in April 2017, [16] and another $40 million in July 2018. [17] The company filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in April 2019 and debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on May 17, 2019. [18] [19]

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. [20]

In August 2020, Fastly announced it was acquiring cybersecurity company Signal Sciences for $775 million ($200 million in cash and $575 million in stock). [21]

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. [22] [23]

In May 2022, Fastly announced it had acquired Glitch, a web coding platform with more than 1.8 million developers. [24] [25]

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. [26] 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. [27] [28]

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. [29]

In August 2023, it was announced Fastly has acquired the domain status API provider, Domainr. [30]

In November 2023, Brett Shirk resigned as CRO, [31] he was replaced 6 months later by Scott Lovett. [32]

In August of 2024, Fastly laid off 11% of its work force. [33]

Operation

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. [34] Fastly offers semantic web caching as a feature. [35]

Fastly supports the UDP-based HTTP/3 protocol, as well as DRM enabled content, encryption and secure tokens to restrict media access. [34] [36]

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. [37]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Akamai Technologies</span> American computer networking company

Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American company specialized in content delivery network (CDN), cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and cloud services. It is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amazon Web Services</span> On-demand cloud computing company

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Clients will often use this in combination with autoscaling. These cloud computing web services provide various services related to networking, compute, storage, middleware, IoT and other processing capacity, as well as software tools via AWS server farms. This frees clients from managing, scaling, and patching hardware and operating systems. One of the foundational services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, with extremely high availability, which can be interacted with over the internet via REST APIs, a CLI or the AWS console. AWS's virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; hard-disk (HDD)/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salesforce</span> American software company

Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and application development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">F5, Inc.</span> U.S. information technology company

F5, Inc. is an American technology company specializing in application security, multi-cloud management, online fraud prevention, application delivery networking (ADN), application availability & performance, network security, and access & authorization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yandex</span> Russian multinational technology company

Yandex LLC is a Russian technology company that provides Internet-related products and services including a web browser, search engine, cloud computing, web mapping, online food ordering, streaming media, online shopping, and a ridesharing company.

Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in San Antonio, Texas. It also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Dubai, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, Mexico and Hong Kong. Its data centers are located in Amsterdam (Netherlands), Virginia (USA), Chicago (USA), Dallas (USA), London (UK), Frankfurt (Germany), Hong Kong (China), Kansas City (USA), New York City (USA), San Jose (USA), Shanghai (China), Queenstown (Singapore) and Sydney (Australia).

Lumen Technologies, Inc. is an American telecommunications company headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana, which offers communications, network services, security, cloud solutions, voice and managed services through its fiber optic and copper networks, as well as its data centers and cloud computing services. The company has been included in the S&P 600 index since being removed from the S&P 500 in March 2023.

Shopify Inc., stylized as shopify, is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. Shopify is the name of its proprietary e-commerce platform for online stores and retail POS (point-of-sale) systems. The platform offers retailers a suite of services, including payments, marketing, shipping and customer engagement tools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Unity Technologies</span> American software developer

Unity Software Inc. is an American video game software development company based in San Francisco. It was founded in Denmark in 2004 as Over the Edge Entertainment and changed its name in 2007. Unity Technologies is best known for the development of Unity, a licensed game engine used to create video games and other applications.

Egnyte is a software company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It sells cloud-based content security, compliance, and collaboration tools for businesses. Egnyte was founded in 2007 with a focus on modernized file servers, but it has since shifted to selling tools that help users securely collaborate with coworkers and third parties.

Twilio Inc. is an American cloud communications company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using its web service APIs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloudflare</span> American technology company

Cloudflare, Inc. is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, wide area network services, reverse proxies, Domain Name Service, and ICANN-accredited domain registration services. Cloudflare's headquarters are in San Francisco, California. According to W3Techs, Cloudflare is used by more than 19% of the Internet for its web security services, as of 2024.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Palo Alto Networks</span> American technology company

Palo Alto Networks, Inc. is an American multinational cybersecurity company with headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The core product is a platform that includes advanced firewalls and cloud-based offerings that extend those firewalls to cover other aspects of security. The company serves over 70,000 organizations in over 150 countries, including 85 of the Fortune 100. It is home to the Unit 42 threat research team and hosts the Ignite cybersecurity conference. It is a partner organization of the World Economic Forum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DigitalOcean</span> American cloud infrastructure provider

DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, US, with 15 globally distributed data centers. DigitalOcean provides developers, startups, and SMBs with cloud infrastructure-as-a-service platforms.

Pluralsight, LLC is an American privately held online education company that offers a variety of video training courses for software developers, IT administrators, and creative professionals through its website. Founded in 2004 by Aaron Skonnard, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, and Bill Williams, the company has its headquarters in Draper, Utah. As of July 2018, it uses more than 1,400 subject-matter experts as authors, and offers more than 7,000 courses in its catalog. Since first moving its courses online in 2007, the company has expanded, developing a full enterprise platform, and adding skills assessment modules.

Snowflake Inc. is an American cloud-based data storage company. Headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, it operates a platform that allows for data analysis and simultaneous access of data sets with minimal latency. It operates on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. As of January 2024, the company had 9,437 customers, including 691 members of the Forbes Global 2000, and processed 4.2 billion daily queries across its platform.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Apigee</span> API management tools and predictive analytics softwares provider

Apigee Corp. was an API management and predictive analytics software provider before its merger into Google Cloud. It was founded in 2004 as Sonoa Systems before being rebranded as Apigee in 2010. Apigee was acquired by Google in a deal worth $625 million in 2016.

PagerDuty is an American cloud computing company specializing in a SaaS incident management platform for IT operations departments.

Swiggy is an Indian online food ordering and delivery company. Founded in 2014, Swiggy is headquartered in Bangalore and operates in more than 580 Indian cities, as of July 2023. Besides food delivery, the platform also provides quick commerce services under the name Swiggy Instamart, and same-day package deliveries with Swiggy Genie.

Zscaler, Inc. is an American cloud security company based in San Jose, California. The company offers cloud-based services to protect enterprise networks and data.

References

  1. "US SEC: Form 10-K Fastly, Inc". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. 22 February 2024.
  2. "S-1 Registration Statement, Fastly Inc". www.sec.gov. Retrieved 2024-10-11.
  3. 1 2 Kepes, Ben (April 18, 2017). "In the need for speed, Fastly goes all the way to the edge". Computerworld . Archived from the original on April 19, 2017. Retrieved October 10, 2017.
  4. "Discontent and disruption in the world of content delivery networks". TechCrunch. June 2017.
  5. "The benefits of using Varnish". Fastly.com. 30 March 2015. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  6. "FastlyNetworkCapcity".
  7. "Fastly Inc (FSLY) Stock Price & News". Google Finance. Retrieved 2024-07-23.
  8. Novet, Jordan (September 16, 2014). "Fastly grabs $40M on its quest to build a big, cool content-delivery network". VentureBeat. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  9. Rockwell, Nick (2018-09-07). "Open Questions: A Conversation with Fastly CEO Artur Bergman". The New York Times . Retrieved 2022-05-30.
  10. "Fastly Raises $10M for Content Delivery Network Built for Mobile, Real-Time World". TechCrunch. June 6, 2013. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  11. Richards, Ryan (April 16, 2014). "Ruby on Rails on Fastly". www.fastly.com. Archived from the original on December 23, 2020. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  12. Miller, Ron (September 16, 2014). "Fastly Growing Quickly Snags $40M As VCs Give Generously". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  13. Lardinois, Frederic (August 5, 2015). "Fastly Raises $75M For Its Real-Time CDN". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  14. "Google Partners With CloudFlare, Fastly, Level 3 And Highwinds To Help Developers Push Google Cloud Content To Users Faster". TechCrunch. 9 September 2015.
  15. "Fastly Releases Edge Cloud Platform". Bizty.
  16. "Fastly raises another $50 million for its content delivery networking technology". TechCrunch. 23 May 2017. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  17. Dillet, Romain (July 17, 2018). "Fastly raises another $40 million before an IPO". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  18. Shieber, Jonathan (April 20, 2019). "Fastly, the content delivery network, files for an IPO". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  19. Novet, Jordan (May 17, 2019). "Fastly shares rocket as much as 60% in IPO debut". CNBC. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  20. Hernbroth, Megan (February 23, 2020). "'I like being in the trenches': Fastly CEO steps down after disappointing market debuts, citing his 'true strengths and passions' as a developer instead of company leader". Business Insider Australia. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  21. Shieber, Jonathan (August 27, 2020). "LA gets a big SaaS exit as Fastly nabs the Culver City-based Signal Sciences for $775M". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 23, 2020.
  22. "Fastly Appoints Ron Kisling as CFO". www.businesswire.com. 2021-06-29. Retrieved 2021-07-07.
  23. Maurer, Mark (2021-06-29). "Cloud-Services Firm Fastly Hires Google Executive as CFO". Wall Street Journal. ISSN   0099-9660 . Retrieved 2021-07-07.
  24. Kastrenakes, Jacob (2022-05-19). "Glitch acquired by cloud service provider Fastly". The Verge. Retrieved 2022-05-20.
  25. Robison, Kylie. "$1.3 billion cloud company Fastly is acquiring popular developer startup Glitch in a push to help coders build bigger, better apps". Business Insider. Retrieved 2024-07-23.
  26. Singh, Manish; Dillet, Romain (8 June 2021). "Twitch, Pinterest, Reddit and more go down in Fastly CDN outage". TechCrunch . Retrieved 2021-06-08.
  27. Rockwell, Nick (2021-06-08). "Summary of June 8 outage". Fastly Blog. Retrieved 2021-06-09.
  28. "How One Fastly Customer Broke The Internet". Gizmodo . 9 June 2021. Retrieved 2021-06-13.
  29. Narcisi, Gina (2022-08-03). "Cisco Networking And Cloud Leader Todd Nightingale to join Fastly as CEO". CRN . Retrieved 2022-08-03.
  30. "Fastly acquires Domainr and launches new TLS Certification Authority". SiliconANGLE. 2023-08-17. Retrieved 2023-08-18.
  31. MarketScreener (2023-11-29). "Fastly, Inc. Announces Resignation of Brett Shirk as Chief Revenue Officer, Effective on December 1, 2023 - MarketScreener". uk.marketscreener.com. Retrieved 2024-10-06.
  32. "Fastly Names Scott R. Lovett as Chief Revenue Officer". Yahoo Finance. 2024-05-28. Retrieved 2024-10-06.
  33. Editor, Tiyashi Datta, SA News (2024-08-08). "Fastly to reduce global headcount by 11% (NYSE:FSLY) | Seeking Alpha". seekingalpha.com. Retrieved 2024-11-05.{{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  34. 1 2 Williams, Mike (15 February 2021). "Fastly review". TechRadar .
  35. Dotson, Kyt (June 13, 2024). "Fastly releases global cloud AI accelerator to help developers reduce costs and boost performance". Silicon Angle. Retrieved July 8, 2024.
  36. Sudia, David (2023-01-05). "How to Get Started with HTTP/3". The New Stack. Retrieved 2023-05-12.
  37. Dee, Katie (March 27, 2023). "Fastly Revamps Partner Program To Harness 'Huge Untapped Potential' In The Channel". CRN. The Channel Company. Retrieved May 29, 2024.