Company: FSLY
Filing Date: 2025-02-26
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001517413-25-000063
Chunk: 17

Company: Fastly, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-26
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 17
---
 support modern digital experiences. We sit between our customers’ end users and their origin—whether that’s in the cloud, on premise or a hybrid environment—and power online experiences that are fast, safe, and engaging. 

Fastly was founded in an era where legacy CDNs were failing to keep up with the explosive growth of user-generated content and demands for faster, more personalized websites and apps. Legacy CDNs could not cache highly dynamic content at the edge—they had to continuously go back to origin to fetch this content, driving up egress costs. Deploying changes meant, at best, hours-long waits for configurations to propagate. At worst, it meant being forced to engage professional services at a cost of hundreds of dollars an hour. Legacy CDNs also failed to provide real-time visibility. Traffic logs were provided in batch format, meaning the data could be anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours old, making it impossible to monitor performance and get instant feedback.

With a view to addressing these challenges, we have taken a fundamentally different approach to architecting our platform. 

•Powerful POPs. We have architected our Points of Presence (“POPs”) using robust customized servers with incredible processing density. As a result, our POPs require minimal footprint and yield colocation cost savings compared to traditional POP architectures. We have located these POPs near major cloud providers and peered with Internet exchange points around the world, so that we can deliver content as close to end users as possible. Because our POPs are powerful and well-connected to the Internet, we are able to operate fewer of them and still achieve optimal performance relative to traditional POPs. 

•Software-defined network. We have built a smarter network using fast switches and routing intelligence at the server layer. This has allowed us to provide real-time responses by ensuring our customers’ traffic is routed in the most optimal manner on our network.

•Network Resilience. Our network is built to withstand common performance degradation or connectivity issues with internet transit providers. With fast path failover we automatically detect and re-route underperforming edge connections at the transport layer. Precision Path detects underperforming origin connections and automatically reroutes the connection to the best alternative in real-time. AutoPilot is an automated egress traffic engineering solution which enables us to reliably deliver high traffic events without manual intervention. 

•Fully programmable. In keeping with our belief that companies should be able to control everything through software, we have built a fully programmable platform. Using Varnish Configuration Language (“VCL”) as