Your site's performance needs to be monitored closely, but once you start your monitoring initiative, you might find yourself drowning in an endless wave of information. This can make it difficult for you to get insight into your online systems. Here are some simple steps for performance monitoring that will produce easy-to-interpret, actionable data.

We often say that Fastly can easily become an extension of your app — there are three major components that make this possible: caching, control, and visibility.

Building a new point of presence (POP) from scratch involves all of the engineering groups within Fastly. Our data center infrastructure (DCI) team spearheads and coordinates the POP build from hardware procurement to putting the POP into production and serving traffic.

We’re more engaged online than ever before, especially when it comes to consuming news. If you work with online media brands, you’re well aware that the way readers engage with news events is changing.

Before diving into CORS (Cross-origin resource sharing), I need to mention JSONP, which is the other solution to getting data from a different “Origin.” In Using ESI, Part 2: Leveraging VCL and ESI to Use JSONP, Simon explains what JSONP is, and how to cache it with Fastly, using one Fastly specific feature, req.topurl. Now, with Varnish 4.1, req.top.url (note the extra period) is available, and it allows you to do the same thing with vanilla Varnish.

You may not know that the software your developers use can affect the success of your marketing activities. It’s within both teams’ interests to collaborate to ensure good performance.

In November 2014, we announced Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator, a collaboration with Google Cloud Platform that combines the power of Google’s infrastructure with the speed and flexibility of our real-time content delivery network. We're seeing more of our customers leverage cost-effective cloud services to build scalable infrastructure, and so today we're excited to announce that we're expanding our collaboration with Google Cloud Platform.

A CDN not only shields your origin from spikes in traffic, but it also ensures speedy delivery of content. This helps you meet your users’ expectations when they visit your site, whether that’s reading the latest news on the royal baby or purchasing a coveted item during a flash sale. To do this well, your CDN needs to have a few key qualities, including prioritizing site uptime and performance, the ability to make updates and serve content in real time, and up-to-the-second visibility into logs and performance analytics. Below, Fastly’s customers discuss how our CDN has helped them during high-traffic events.

In a previous post, I discussed the benefits of Fastly edge modules. Among those listed is GeoIP / Geography Detection, which is useful for any company (especially those in ecommerce, hospitality/travel, and media) that needs to segment content delivery based on geographic location.

As I've written about before, there is a growing class of content called “event-driven content” that may appear dynamic, but isn’t. Even though caching this type of content is more difficult, it’s possible to cache it with the right tools — although you might have been told otherwise. In doing so, you can leverage the power of caching in new ways and reap the benefits that come along with it.

In this post and going forward, we’re going to take a step back, talk about the different types of content our customers are dealing with the most, and discuss how cacheable or uncacheable they are.

Reusing connections between your Varnish instance and your backends (origins) is a good idea for multiple reasons. If your Varnish is on the same network as your backends and you're doing low volume traffic, you can stop reading, because a) the difference will probably be negligible, and b) you're probably already reusing backend connections.

Ecommerce companies face challenges that a content delivery network built on Varnish can help address. To stay competitive and relevant, ecommerce websites and applications need to be able to target specific content to specific users (based on location, language, or browsing preferences), tailor content delivery depending on which device a consumer is using, and prioritize shoppers based on actions they’ve taken within a site or app.

End users are consumers who will use a service, and monitoring their performance is often overlooked. See how monitoring performance of end users improves user experience.

Varnish is an open source web accelerator that is designed for high-performance content delivery. Learn more about what Varnish is and how Fastly's varnish can help accelerate your content.

Today, we’re excited to announce Soft Purge, a new purging feature that allows you to easily mark content as outdated (stale) instead of permanently deleting it from Fastly’s caches. With Soft Purge, you have the same real-time purging options that you get with Instant Purge: purge by URL or by surrogate key.

The cache hit ratio (or hit ratio for short) is the ratio of hits to cacheable requests (hits and misses combined). There's also cache coverage, the ratio of cacheable requests to all requests (cacheable requests and passes). In most cases, you'll want both to be as high as possible, since misses and passes cause load on your origins, and are slower than cache hits.

Solid-State Drives (SSDs) are semiconductor-based storage devices that save persistent data by using NAND flash memory. See how Fastly manages caches with SSDs and how you can save.

If you want to increase the efficiency of your Varnish (or Fastly) cache, you need to figure out what traffic is not cached. By definition, any traffic that reaches your origin is not cached, and thus worthy of investigation.

In the second part of our series on accelerating Rails, I'll cover configuration of a few Fastly features, Varnish and Varnish Configuration Language (VCL), and strategies for caching dynamic content that are targeted towards the Rails developer.