Fastly acquires Glitch, enables faster developer innovation

Fastly has announced it has acquired Glitch, a developer platform where more than 1.8 million developers create and share full-stack web apps without having to run the infrastructure or manage tools themselves.

According to Fastly, organisations are gaining significant business advantages by leveraging the applications their developers have built. As a result, developers need to go from a moment of inspiration to deployed code faster than ever.

Glitch enables this rapid innovation through a simplified development environment, remixable code, and a growing community of collaborative developers.

Serverless technologies such a Fastly's WebAssembly-based edge platform removes barriers to innovation while natively providing security and performance, the company states.

Fastly chief architect Artur Bergman says, "Fastly was founded by developers, for developers and, together with Glitch, we take an important step forward in making it easier for customers to innovate at a layer in the software stack that they could not access before.

"This acquisition brings together two of the worlds best ecosystems for application development into a single, seamless developer experience to deliver globally performant, secure and reliable applications at scale.

Once Fastly and Glitch are integrated, developers will be able to leverage a Yes Code environment to take devs from Hello World to deploy quickly and at global scale, and increase the breadth of their applications use cases with the click of a button, the company states.

The Glitch team will form a new Developer Experience team within Fastly that will leverage their expertise to create a repository of tools and resources for users. This includes everything from remixable starter app templates right through to blogs, tutorials and talks.

In addition, the team will build easier pathways for gathering feedback to help improve Fastly's suite of offerings, the company states.

Glitch CEO Anil Dash says, "At Glitch, we've always been about making it as easy as possible to go from an idea to a running app.

"By teaming up with Fastly, we're going to be able to give superpowers to our community of millions of coders and creators, and set the stage for them to tap into the huge potential of Fastly's globally distributed edge platform in the future."

Dash concludes, "I'm incredibly excited about teaming up with Fastly, and can't wait to see what developers do with the powerful new tools we'll be creating together.

Fastly states the company is committed to keeping the Glitch community intact, and working with Glitch to further strengthen the platform through technical integrations with Fastly's technology. Glitch users can continue to collaborate and share code in Glitch's developer community as they do today.

In and of itself, Fastly combines a fast global edge cloud network with software to helps customers develop, deliver and secure modern distributed applications and compelling digital experiences. Fastly's customers include prominent companies such as Pinterest, The New York Times, and GitHub.