Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Fastly?

Fastly is on a mission to make the internet faster, smarter and more secure. That was the clear message from a recent interview with the company's Area Vice President, Derek Rast, and Asia-Pacific Technology Evangelist, Stephen Gillies, who joined this week's edition of 10 Minute IT Jams.

For those unfamiliar with the name, Fastly describes itself as an "edge cloud platform" - sitting between the major cloud infrastructure providers and end users to enhance the speed, intelligence and security of digital experiences. "Essentially you can think of us as the in-between between your cloud infrastructure and your end users," said Rast. "We're there to help provide a faster, smarter and more secure experience."

Founded by developers in San Francisco in 2011, Fastly was built "by developers who wanted a better way to do things," Rast explained. He detailed how legacy content delivery networks (CDNs) operated as opaque "black boxes," offering scant control and visibility for developers. That frustration formed the foundation of Fastly's technology: "In order to be able to bring those edge services and that control into the application, you had to build three things… complete control of the edge, complete visibility at the edge, and the ability to do everything in real time."

Since those early days, Fastly has expanded its product suite to include delivery services, security services and compute at the edge. Rast said the technology is now chosen by clients running everything from live television streams to major retail events. "Whether you're Network 10 streaming hundreds of thousands of live streams of the Melbourne Cup, or you are Kogan handling a thundering herd of customers on a Black Friday sales event, or you're Linktree - a recent customer of ours who added four million users in three months - you turn to Fastly to help you execute on your business outcomes," he said.

One significant milestone in Fastly's security strategy was last year's acquisition of Signal Sciences, a well-regarded API and application security technology company. "Signal Sciences is an amazing API and application security technology," Rast said. "Second, incredible people. And then third, one of the real important things for us is they had a similar DNA and really wanting to empower developers." He stressed the deep alignment between the two companies' cultures, both being "built by developers for developers."

Rast also used the interview to reveal breaking news: "We actually just announced our beta of the Signal Sciences Edge Agent, which will be coming out very soon - so you'll start to see the power of those two technologies coming together."

When asked about the latest innovations from Fastly, Gillies highlighted a constant drive towards better security for its customers. "Every one of our customers is really, really super focused on security," he said, emphasising that the Signal Sciences acquisition - and deeper integration of their technology into Fastly's CDN, edge delivery, and streaming media solutions - was a major step forward. However, he added, "We don't just stand still on innovation. We're continuing to build out the platform. I couldn't mention innovation without talking about our recent partnership with Okta, for example."

The ultimate goal, he said, is arming customers with the tools to deploy top-tier security and high-speed applications across today's increasingly multi-cloud, API-driven environments. "Everything is API-first for configuration. The whole software development life cycle for our customers has really changed over the last 10 years and Fastly is right here innovating with those customers as well," Gillies said.

Security remains a consistent theme. Fastly recently released research showing an urgent need for modern security solutions as organisations pivot towards the cloud and APIs. "It was fascinating research, and quite scary actually," said Gillies. "The research turned up that in Australia, only about 50 per cent of the respondents even have a web application firewall in front of their API endpoints." With so many sensitive transactions and personal data moving through these channels, he said, "That's pretty scary when you think about it."

The gap in basic API endpoint protection creates opportunities, Gillies acknowledged, but it also risks significant vulnerabilities for businesses adopting API-first models. He explained there are now two main categories of web application firewalls (WAFs): legacy, which rely on "regular expressions and pattern matching," and next-generation, such as Signal Sciences', which focus on "the behaviour and the intent of the request - and that's super important."

Fastly's next-gen WAF, now benefiting from Signal Sciences' smart agent deployment model, can sit "really super close to your application – could be sitting alongside your API endpoints," but can also be deployed in the cloud at the edge. "It's really exciting," said Gillies.

When it comes to local presence, Fastly has invested steadily in Australia and New Zealand. Gillies explained, "The company's actually been in the region for many years, in fact almost since the inception. Initially that really was to deliver our global customers and deliver their business into Australia and New Zealand and give their customers the absolute best experience." Today, Fastly's infrastructure stretches across Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, as well as Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch in New Zealand. "As our customer base grows, we continue to invest and we'll be growing quite significantly over the next year," he added.

For enterprise end users seeking to engage Fastly's services, the process is designed to be as straightforward as possible. "You can reach out to us on LinkedIn, but sort of living up to that ethos of developer-first, developer-friendly, you can go to Fastly and sign up for a developer account today, and start working with us without even talking to us," Rast said.

Asked for final thoughts on Fastly's approach as it expands further in the region, Rast summed up their mission: "We want to give our customers the ability to deploy security, to make sure that their applications are super fast, and we want to give them the ability to do that in what most customers today are deploying - multiple clouds, API-focused, everything is API-first for configuration," he said. "Fastly is right here innovating with those customers as well."