February 2026 Summaries

Modern companies often manage numerous domains and microservices across global infrastructures, and identifying issues quickly is crucial to avoid prolonged downtimes and revenue loss. Alerts act as an early warning system, helping teams detect and address anomalies before they escalate, thereby reducing Mean Time to Detect and Resolve (MTTD/MTTR). Fastly has improved its control panel by consolidating various alerts into a centralized notification drawer, enhancing situational awareness with quick access to key alert details. Essential alerts for engineering teams include monitoring total traffic volume, bandwidth changes, client-side 4xx errors, server-side 5xx errors, potential DDoS attacks, and spend alerts to prevent unexpected costs. By correlating these alerts, teams can more efficiently diagnose and resolve incidents, leading to faster detection and a better user experience. Alerts can be customized within Fastly's control panel, where users can easily configure them to fit their operational needs and access notifications through a single bell icon interface.

Fastly's fourth annual Global Security Research Report highlights the challenges AI-first organizations face in balancing rapid AI integration with modernized security measures. These companies, which embed AI into their core processes and offerings, experience significantly longer recovery times and higher costs following security incidents compared to their peers. The report reveals that 44% of AI-first businesses had AI directly exploited in security breaches, and AI scraping has become a significant cost issue for the majority of companies, impacting infrastructure and operational expenses. The role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is under increased scrutiny, with nearly three-quarters of organizations holding them accountable for breaches, leading to policy changes and heightened involvement in incident response. While AI exacerbates some security challenges, organizations that implement post-incident reviews and response automation have reduced recovery times, indicating that integrating security measures from the beginning can facilitate smoother AI adoption. The report, based on a survey of 2,000 key IT decision-makers across various industries and regions, emphasizes the necessity of aligning security infrastructure advancements with AI development.

Fastly is enhancing its security maintenance and incident management by introducing private notifications for detailed service updates, ensuring sensitive information remains secure while keeping relevant teams informed. With the integration of Single Sign-On (SSO) and seamless Slack integration, users receive exclusive access to detailed maintenance schedules and incident updates directly in their Slack channels, minimizing unnecessary inquiries and improving response times. This system allows for secure communication during active incidents like Denial of Service attacks, enabling teams to make informed decisions quickly without exposing sensitive data. Fastly's commitment to transparency and security is reflected in its scalable notification system, which aims to streamline operations and support business growth while maintaining the integrity of their services. The initiative is part of Fastly's broader goal to enhance digital experiences by fostering a safer and more efficient internet.

Fastly Object Storage (FOS) aims to provide developers with a solution to store and serve large-scale content with minimal latency and no egress fees, catering to the demands of edge computing. The recent expansion more than doubles its global footprint with the addition of five new regions in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, enhancing localized low-latency performance and simplifying regional data residency requirements. This expansion not only increases capacity but also offers architectural flexibility, including improved latency, egress-free data handling, regional redundancy for business continuity, and predictable pricing. Fastly's ongoing growth includes new features like On-Demand Migration, which allows for a cost-effective, stateless migration of only active data, and simplified bucket management, facilitating the movement of large data sets. With these enhancements, Fastly Object Storage is designed to scale with users, offering a robust solution for global deployments.

Fastly has introduced a new domain management system that treats domains as independent resources, no longer tied to service configurations, to enhance flexibility, reduce deployment risks, and simplify workflows. This update allows for easier management of domains, certificates, and routing relationships, enabling users to switch services without downtime and manage multiple domains without service pinning. Key benefits include version-less domains, the ability to prepare domains with TLS certificates without immediate service assignment, and no domain service limits, making it suitable for large teams and multi-service architectures. The update includes a new Domains management page for user interface navigation, and users of Fastly CLI and Terraform provider are encouraged to upgrade to versions that support the new model. While the new system offers advantages, it also introduces considerations like changes to how multi-level wildcards and purging are handled, aligning with DNS and TLS standards. Fastly acknowledges potential migration challenges but emphasizes future features that will be exclusive to the new system, encouraging users to transition and enjoy the enhanced flexibility, simplicity, and security.

Recent high-profile cloud platform outages have underscored the importance of adopting a multi-CDN strategy to mitigate operational risks, enhance resilience, and optimize performance. By distributing traffic across multiple content delivery networks (CDNs), companies can maintain uptime and reduce the impact of regional bottlenecks or outages, ensuring a high-performance experience for users worldwide. Multi-CDN strategies can be implemented through various methods, including DNS-based steering, Layer 7 traffic management, CDN chaining, and client-side steering, each offering different levels of control and flexibility. Fastly is highlighted as a platform adept at handling the complexities of multi-CDN setups, offering both straightforward and advanced deployment models without a single operating method. The platform supports various design methods and provides sophisticated security controls to maintain consistent security across multiple CDNs, thereby reducing the risks associated with a fragmented security landscape. Fastly's capabilities allow for dynamic content caching, instant purging, and enhanced security management, making it a viable choice for companies looking to implement or optimize a multi-CDN strategy to ensure delivery resilience and cost efficiency.

In large-scale ecommerce settings, page performance significantly influences customer engagement, with even minor latency increases potentially reducing conversion rates and customer retention, especially on mobile devices. Traditional CDNs face challenges in delivering dynamic content efficiently, but Fastly's collaboration with Google Cloud aims to address this by combining Fastly's edge cloud capabilities with Google's infrastructure. This partnership allows for efficient caching of dynamic content, enhancing user experience by reducing latency and improving conversion rates while also lowering total cost of ownership and enhancing scalability. The technical architecture utilizes surrogate keys and Fastly's Instant Purge to ensure dynamic content remains fresh without compromising speed. The integration not only improves global performance and content freshness but also enhances security and provides real-time analytics through Google's services. This collaboration offers a robust solution for modern ecommerce platforms, addressing scalability and performance challenges effectively.

Configuring Fastly services using Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) has been enhanced with a Visual Studio Code extension that provides a comprehensive suite of features for developers. Initially offering syntax highlighting through VS Code's declarative language extension, the extension now includes diagnostics, contextual completions, signature help, and documentation on hover, utilizing programmatic language extension APIs to enhance development efficiency. Recent upgrades have expanded its functionality to include features such as navigating to definitions, finding all references, document formatting, code folding, renaming symbols, and displaying symbol outlines and breadcrumbs for better navigation. Additional tools like inlay hints and smart selection ranges further streamline the coding process. Powered by the falco VCL developer tool, this extension transforms VS Code into a robust IDE for managing Fastly VCL configurations, making it easy for users to install and leverage these capabilities directly in their development environment.

Fastly's journey in optimizing Kubernetes Continuous Delivery (CD) reveals the challenges and solutions encountered while managing multi-cluster systems at scale. Initially, GitOps provided consistency but fell short due to its lack of orchestration and validation functionalities, leading Fastly to develop a lightweight orchestration layer atop ArgoCD. As the platform expanded, a more automated and standardized workflow became essential to handle progressive rollouts and validation gates across multiple environments. Fastly relied on various tools like ArgoCD for manifest management and Terratest for infrastructure testing, alongside developing custom solutions to post ArgoCD diffs to GitHub. Issues with Progressive Syncs in ArgoCD prompted Fastly to create their own sync orchestrator, a Python CLI that ensured applications were synced in the desired order. To further streamline their pipeline, Fastly integrated Argo Workflows as the automation engine, allowing for flexible, reliable, and human-intervened application promotions. This customized approach provided the control and predictability needed to safely deliver software while adapting to Fastly's specific requirements.

Fastly's Voice of the Customer (VOC) strategy is centered on capturing and analyzing customer feedback from various touchpoints to drive product development and improve user experiences. The approach involves listening to signals from every interaction, contextualizing feedback, and transforming insights into actionable changes, thereby fostering a continuous loop of improvement. This process is exemplified by the development of Fastly's API Discovery tool, which emerged from customer conversations highlighting visibility gaps and deployment challenges. By integrating customer insights into decision-making, Fastly aims to build trust and co-innovate with its users, ensuring that their products address real-world problems effectively.

Infrastructure costs for modern applications can unexpectedly rise due to factors like data egress pricing, which often goes underestimated but becomes significant as applications scale. Fastly suggests that with the right architecture and platform, it's possible to reduce unnecessary origin traffic and control egress costs. This involves treating Cache Hit Ratio (CHR) as a business metric, normalizing request keys, leveraging "stale" headers for resilience, using smart purging techniques, and consolidating traffic with an Origin Shield to centralize requests and save on egress charges. Cache Reservation can protect high-demand content from eviction, ensuring predictable availability and cost efficiency, while reconsidering the storage of large assets can further optimize expenses. Fastly's Origin Inspector provides real-time visibility into data flow, helping teams manage costs proactively by identifying cost drivers and validating optimizations. By adopting disciplined caching, protected edge storage, and an edge-native content serving approach, businesses can better control their infrastructure expenses and scale effectively, viewing rising costs as a manageable design choice rather than an inevitability.

In an era where automation pervades digital interactions, distinguishing between beneficial and malicious automated traffic is critical for maintaining security without disrupting operations. Fastly's Next-Gen Web Application Firewall (WAF) addresses this challenge by offering signal exclusion rules, which prevent specific automated requests from being mistakenly flagged as threats. These rules enable businesses to continue using trusted internal tools and third-party integrations without triggering false positives, which can lead to service interruptions and data errors. By using unique HTTP headers or carefully managed IP addresses to identify legitimate automation, organizations can apply these exclusion rules effectively, ensuring that beneficial bot traffic is not impeded, while still maintaining comprehensive protection against actual threats. This granularity helps maintain robust security by allowing other WAF rules to remain active, protecting against common exploits such as SQL Injection or Command Execution, even when trusted sources become compromised.

Websites today heavily depend on third-party resources such as analytics, fonts, and ad tech to enhance user experiences, but this reliance introduces significant risks related to site speed and uptime, as revealed by a study indicating that 67% of sites request at least one render-blocking resource. Fastly highlights that although many organizations use a multi-CDN strategy for redundancy, unintentional dependencies can lead to increased vulnerabilities, as evidenced by analysis showing that numerous Fastly customers load critical content from other CDNs, risking outages. When these dependencies fail, it can result in visible errors like a 30-second white screen, as seen during a TikTok outage affecting major retailers. To mitigate these risks, websites can proxy third-party scripts through their own domain using Fastly, which offers resilience, improved performance, control over caching and compression, and enhanced privacy by preventing data leakage. This approach ensures that even during third-party outages, websites can maintain functionality and safeguard revenue, prompting a call to audit sites for render-blocking resources and consider Fastly's solutions to manage dependencies effectively.