Fastly

Fastly.com - Migration and Mobilization of an Enterprise-grade Content Delivery Network

The Challenge

Fastly is a next-generation content delivery network (CDN) with dozens of enterprise-grade customers that offers a wide variety of personalized services through its website. Similar to Akamai, this cutting-edge startup is venture-backed and delivers incredibly high performance to its clients. Its mission is to help businesses operate in real time and increase their speed of innovation. It integrates with existing software stacks via API and its custom configurations and real-time performance analytics allow clients to make informed decisions instantly, ensuring a better user experience for visitors and shoppers.

Third & Grove migrated Fastly from Jekyll to Drupal and delivered a responsive refresh, as well as designing and building the entire site. We were asked to take on the project because Fastly needed world-class performance, we had proven our ability with top-shelf front-end performance by building Intuit’s mint.com, one of the highest traffic Drupal sites in the world, and our engineers had plenty of experience with CDNs at enterprise scale.

The Approach

Fast, Faster, Fastly
When your business hinges on moving your customers to the next level of speed and reliability, your own website had better offer seamless performance. Moreover, it should be designed to meet the needs of a team working in a lightning-fast and increasingly complex environment.

Though the Fastly team didn’t need to implement dozens of complex features immediately, they wanted to lay the groundwork for future scale-up by choosing a system flexible and expansive enough to meet projected needs such as international support, tight security, plugins and API integrations, publishing management and SEO optimization.

Tools designed for scale-up
Before we migrated them to Drupal, fastly.com was powered by Jekyll, a static website generator. This worked well when only the Engineering Department needed to make updates to the site, but as Fastly grew rapidly, the website became an increasingly important marketing tool. The marketing team needed the ability to make real-time updates to the site themselves without engineering support.

Fastly editors wanted to post blogs and content instantaneously, highlight the exponential growth of their success stories, easily share relevant international events and develop a successful press room. Because the Fastly CDN has an excellent API, we were able to extend the granularity of cache control over content to further empower the editorial team to make changes live immediately.

There were a few important integration points, including Eloqua and the Fastly CDN user backend. Embedded Eloqua forms were used for marketing information capture and the site also contained a signup form for a Fastly CDN service account. Third & Grove also set up the SalesForce integration so that Fastly can properly manage its customer base as it continues to grow.

Acquia: A fast and secure platform for a fast and secure CDN
As a global content delivery network, Fastly offers its customers uptime, performance, and protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks. We knew that Fastly.com itself had to be performant, secure, and on a rock-solid platform. Acquia was an excellent partner to ensure the site ran on a secure network designed to handle surges in traffic. Our CEO was able to sleep much more soundly knowing Acquia was running the site.

The Unveiling

Third & Grove took great strides in making the website more logical and efficient by optimizing the site navigation and the taxonomy of key areas. The updated homepage, blog, customer pages and press room were redesigned and made responsive to serve the needs of Fastly’s clients on the go, particularly mobile users. The result is a site that all customers, no matter their topics of interest or needs, can use to quickly meet their objectives.