October 2025 Summaries

The Fastly Compute JavaScript SDK's new streaming HTML rewriter in version 3.35.0 offers a high-performance solution for customizing webpage content by modifying HTML retrieved from external sources. This tool leverages an HTMLRewritingStream API that enables developers to register callbacks on CSS selectors, allowing for dynamic content manipulation such as modifying attributes or adding text to elements like h1 and div tags. By utilizing the TransformStream web standard, the rewriter processes HTML in a streaming manner, which enhances efficiency and integrates smoothly with existing pipelines for both pre- and post-processing transformations. The Fastly rewriter outperforms traditional JavaScript libraries like LinkeDOM by offering significantly faster parsing and rewriting, as demonstrated in performance benchmarks, and utilizes Cloudflare's lol-html Rust crate for real-time processing. This rewriter aims to minimize latency and optimize HTML customization while fitting seamlessly into current web standards, and is positioned as an effective tool for edge computing scenarios.

Recent hyperscaler outages have highlighted the fragility of modern infrastructure, emphasizing the need for more resilient systems as the internet becomes increasingly centralized and interdependent. Fastly is committed to enhancing internet resilience by offering multi-cloud solutions that simplify architecture strategy and planning, providing global load-balancing to reroute traffic, and implementing robust security measures against DDoS attacks. Their edge platform allows customers to maintain service during upstream outages through localized routing, independent control planes, programmable responses, and real-time visibility. Fastly supports a multi-CDN strategy, working closely with customers to ensure reliability during major events and everyday operations. By employing automation tools like Autopilot and Precision Path, they optimize traffic in real time and aim to achieve continuous uptime, despite the inherent challenges of perfect reliability. Fastly collaborates with diverse enterprises to maintain internet stability, offering solutions that prioritize exceptional resiliency, performance, and security.

Fastly has introduced the dns-account-01 ACME challenge type within its Certification Authority, Certainly, to enhance security and performance for users managing multiple CAs in a multi-CDN setup. This development addresses the limitations of the traditional dns-01 challenge by eliminating the issue of _acme-challenge label collisions, which previously complicated automated certificate management across different platforms. The dns-account-01 challenge uses a unique identifier for each ACME account, allowing distinct validation paths for each provider and facilitating seamless certificate management. This innovation allows Fastly customers to enjoy improved reliability and flexibility in managing TLS certificates without operational overhead, offering a robust solution for multi-CDN environments. To implement this feature, customers must contact Fastly support to enable dns-account-01 for their accounts, which requires a one-time DNS configuration change.

Fastly has introduced Managed Security Professional, a new managed security service aimed at providing expert 24/7/365 monitoring and mitigation for critical business applications and APIs. This service is designed to address the increasing complexity of protecting virtual infrastructure amid growing threats, which are becoming more sophisticated and frequent. With a significant portion of IT and cybersecurity professionals lacking the skills to combat these modern attacks, Fastly's offering provides a crucial entry point for organizations needing comprehensive protection. Managed Security Professional promises quarterly reporting and an industry-leading SLA, with Fastly's Customer Security Operations Center (CSOC) setting new standards for responsiveness and customer satisfaction. The service aims to reduce alert fatigue for overworked security teams, allowing them to focus more on proactive security measures. Fastly emphasizes the importance of human expertise in security operations, especially in light of ongoing discussions about AI's role in the industry, and highlights the dedication of its team in achieving high customer satisfaction and resolution rates.

Fastly emphasizes resilience through distributed decision-making and self-healing systems, which are integral to its architecture and culture. Rather than relying on a centralized control system, Fastly's network is composed of autonomous Points of Presence (PoPs) that make real-time decisions independently, reducing single points of failure and enhancing performance by minimizing latency and ensuring reliability during disruptions. This decentralized approach allows for rapid adaptation to changing conditions without a global consensus, as seen in their Precision Path algorithm, which reroutes traffic based on local TCP performance metrics. Complementing this, Fastly's self-healing systems employ high-resolution observability and automation to detect and recover from network issues swiftly, minimizing disruption impact. Their Autopilot logic exemplifies this by autonomously optimizing traffic routes based on real-time telemetry data, preventing congestion without human intervention. This strategic blend of distributed decision-making and self-healing capabilities ensures robust, agile responses to network challenges, maintaining high availability and performance of Fastly's services.

Fastly's API Discovery tool, launched on September 30, is designed to help users efficiently discover, monitor, and secure their APIs by continuously tracking API traffic within Fastly's Edge network, providing a comprehensive snapshot that alerts users to new, updated, or unexpected API requests. This tool addresses the challenges of managing numerous APIs, including the difficulty of locating specific endpoints in a vast list, keeping track of newer versus legacy APIs, and understanding the complex relationships between APIs. To tackle these issues, Fastly offers an intuitive API Security feature that allows users to navigate their API catalogs, identify critical but less frequently called APIs, and visualize how these APIs connect to their underlying resources. The API Discovery tool includes features like a table view for sorting and reviewing API calls and a tree view that organizes APIs within a resource hierarchy, helping users understand their systems' architecture and spot anomalies. This enables users to maintain a clear overview of their API ecosystem, ensuring security and efficiency without the hassle.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month serves as a timely reminder for organizations to not only invest in the right cybersecurity tools but also to make strategic, informed decisions regarding these investments. As the cybersecurity market is projected to grow significantly, with Gartner estimating it will reach $267.3 billion by 2026, security leaders are urged to carefully evaluate their spending and ensure their solutions provide real value amidst economic uncertainties. Key challenges include avoiding common pitfalls in vendor selection, such as prolonged evaluation timelines, underestimating the total cost of ownership (TCO), and impeding agile development processes. Security teams should streamline evaluation and deployment processes, accurately estimate TCO by involving cross-functional stakeholders, and choose web application firewalls (WAFs) that support agile development to maintain competitive edge. By addressing these issues, organizations can optimize their cybersecurity investments and maintain robust protection without straining budgets, facilitating innovation and operational efficiency across the business.

In September 2025, Fastly's monthly DDoS weather report highlighted a significant attack in the Media & Entertainment sector, which involved a sophisticated layer 7 attack peaking at 15.5 million requests per second and lasting over an hour. This attack, although shorter in duration than previous major attacks, was notable for its high volume of real requests, making it difficult to detect and more dangerous than typical DDoS attacks. Despite September seeing a decrease in overall attack volume compared to previous months, largely attributed to a single customer's incident, the report indicates that attacks tend to coincide with the school year, implying potential increases in Q4. Fastly's DDoS Protection successfully mitigated 98% of the attack traffic without affecting legitimate traffic, emphasizing the importance of robust security measures for enterprises, especially those in the frequently targeted Media & Entertainment industry. The report advises organizations to review their DDoS mitigation strategies and consider automated solutions to handle future threats effectively, as attacks remain a persistent challenge.

In 2020, a concept emerged to optimize Varnish’s memory management by clearing only the used portion of memory blocks, rather than wiping the entire block, aiming to improve performance by reducing unnecessary memory operations. The challenge was ensuring data integrity to prevent leaks between requests, which was addressed by implementing a system that tracked the high watermark of memory usage during requests. The breakthrough came when a performance model revealed memory traffic, rather than CPU cycles, as the bottleneck on some AMD machines, prompting the pursuit of this optimization. Safety was ensured by leveraging existing workspace integrity checks and random sampling to validate memory usage correctness without significant overhead. After extensive testing in shadow mode, the optimized approach was rolled out, resulting in substantial reductions in memory writes and CPU usage, particularly on AMD systems, while also improving the instructions-per-cycle (IPC) for other processes by freeing up memory bandwidth. The experience highlighted the importance of focusing on true system bottlenecks, ensuring data security, and re-evaluating past ideas with new insights for potential performance improvements.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into application security (AppSec) is seen as a transformative step to reduce manual efforts and enhance vulnerability detection, with 90% of surveyed security leaders either using or considering AI for their programs. Despite significant adoption, especially in industries like High Tech, SaaS, and Healthcare, concerns persist about AI's reliability, as nearly half of the respondents report frequent false positives and limited oversight of AI results. This has led to a situation where a substantial portion of AppSec issues identified by AI are acted upon without human review, raising questions about risk tolerance and resource constraints. Regional differences in AI adoption are evident, with South America leading and North America trailing, potentially due to differences in talent availability. While AI integration into development pipelines is progressing, challenges such as integration complexity and lack of trust in AI outputs remain. Looking ahead, there is interest in improving AI's accuracy and capabilities, with many organizations exploring new use cases like AI-driven threat modeling and automated code review to enhance security efficiency.

Fastly, a modern content delivery network (CDN), consistently outperforms its competitor Akamai in crucial real-world performance metrics such as Time-to-First-Byte and Largest Contentful Paint, according to Google's Chrome User Experience Report. This performance edge is attributed to Fastly's software-defined edge, intelligent routing, and real-time control, which ensure that content is delivered closer to users, reducing latency and increasing cache hit rates. These capabilities translate into faster, more reliable, and consistent user experiences, driving improved engagement, conversion rates, and revenue for businesses across eCommerce, streaming, gaming, and enterprise platforms. As user expectations for instant access and seamless interaction rise, Fastly's architecture is presented as a strategic asset that not only meets current demands but is also future-ready, positioning it as a leader in the CDN market. The report underscores that performance is not merely a technical metric but a critical driver of business success, turning speed into a competitive advantage and establishing Fastly as the preferred choice for organizations focused on growth and digital excellence.

In the complex and unpredictable environment of the internet, Fastly, a global Content Delivery Network (CDN), focuses on resilience by emphasizing quick response and recovery from disruptions rather than attempting to prevent all failures. Two key pillars of their resilient strategy are fault isolation and graceful degradation. Fault isolation involves designing the CDN to limit the impact of disruptions, such as power failures or DDoS attacks, by restricting the fault's effect to a minimal area, allowing other services to continue unaffected. This is achieved through software engineering principles, including modular design, redundancy, and robust error checking. Meanwhile, graceful degradation ensures systems continue operating in a reduced capacity rather than failing completely, thereby maintaining some level of service during disruptions. Techniques like shedding non-critical load and serving stale content help sustain user experience and provide operational staff with the opportunity to diagnose and address issues without immediate pressure to restore full functionality. These strategies, supported by strong observability, enable Fastly to build a disruption-resistant infrastructure that can withstand and recover from challenges efficiently.

Fastly has been recognized as a Customers' Choice in the 2025 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for Cloud Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) for the seventh consecutive year, highlighting its consistent performance and customer satisfaction. With an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 130 reviews as of July 2025 and 94% of customers willing to recommend it, Fastly's Next-Gen WAF has been praised for its efficiency, transparency, and reliability in security, particularly in full blocking mode, which effectively eliminates false positives. The recognition stems from verified customer reviews, emphasizing the company's focus on addressing client needs and improving its offerings. Fastly's continued evolution and customer-centric approach have fostered trust and confidence, positioning it as a reliable partner in application security, as evidenced by positive feedback from various industry professionals.