okay hello and thank you for joining us for the what is a modern CDN and why is it important webinar during this webinar we will explore the evolution and current state of CDN the benefits of a modern CDN including real world applications how to select a modern CDN provider and what to look for please feel free to chat in your questions and we will try to answer them during the Q&A at the end today our speaker is Lee Chen Lee Chen is the vice president in corporate development and strategic Partnerships here at fley and he sits as the executive sponsor for our media products at fley has led a wide range of functions across product marketing and Partnerships he has spent the last 20 years in media and entertainment space pioneering live broadcasts over the Internet prior to joining fastly he founded and led several startups and technology and Esports and with that I'll turn it over to Lee thanks Lee um hi everyone thanks for joining today just get the slides up real quick everybody should be able to see that right um hi uh thanks for joining in today I really appreciate it uh I am perhaps uh oddly excited to dig into this topic today on what is C modern CDN and why is it important uh prior to joining fastly uh as Lee mentioned um I about about nine years ago I I was lucky enough in my career to spend time on the infrastructure side of the world and also on the direct to Consumer side of the world so I started my career in Telco early Broadband access uh and then having worked in the early days of Esports um uh doing live broadcasts I saw many of the challenges of sort of real-time interactivity and the scaling of those platforms to millions and millions of users so when I joined fastly uh it continued to be an amazing journey for me uh on how to solve problems in Internet scale across a really really wide range of use cases so I'm excited to share with you today some of those things that I've learned uh along the way and why it matters in the modern context of app development uh I'm going to touch on the evolution of a modern CDN as I think that context is really really important to this conversation uh we'll dig into some of the benefits uh talk through some real world examples that I'm really excited about uh and discuss how to choose a modern CDN for your particular use case uh and then quick note about why fastly is a great option uh but I hope this talk will give you some insights about how you can imagine reimagine scaling your app not just for lots of users but also for performance reach security uh and perhaps most importantly control uh and I'll note that the intended audience is very broad today um and the topic is also one that I can spend hours and hours talking about which probably no one really wants so we'll try and go pretty quick today uh as Lee mentioned if you've got questions along the way please please drop them into the Q&A uh and we'll be make sure we'll make sure to get you an answer so let's dig in um what did companies do before cdms in the before times uh so in the early days of the internet um there were a number of challenges particularly as the audience for an app or a site became increasingly du distributed or or even better uh wildly popular but those challenges are also true today I mean more often than not when we first build our our our first app or site uh we don't have a globally distributed Edge Network help to deliver our content securely or quickly around the world um and so we end up with things like poor uh user experiences due to slow load times because of latency considerations or broken sights due to geographically driven charting so to solve this problem can either try and do it up do it ourselves um by standing up multiple instances of our cite or app around the world uh but then we'd have consistency challenges around the data sets so CM were born out of these uh these challenges U the early CDM kind of did the same thing right they created copies or the ability to store multiple copies of the uh same data around the world called them caches um or pops um with slightly better results because they were building these caches to hold copies of the quote unquote static content uh on your on your site or app uh things like images videos text Etc that wasn't really going to change very often uh and so the consist consistency problem was kind of mitigated because the content really didn't change that often but that sorry about that uh but that didn't really help a whole lot when it came to Dynamic content that changed frequently or worse that was personalized per user like say a login State or the homepage of a major news site or even your personal Twitter feed and then also in the early days of the internet the network depal was very different to be effective the early CDN had to put their points of presence or pops deep in the last last mod eyeball networks so as things continued to evolve uh uh CDN continued to really struggle and at the scale and prevalence of the internet and everyday use grew exponentially every year the problems in the original architecture continued to pile up hundreds of thousands of cash servers located deep in the last smile the internet me hundreds of thousands of copies of the same content around the world and the first time uh a piece of content uh say an updated version of the homepage is accessed on any on any one of these cache servers uh around the world it has to go back to origin um uh meaning your appstack to fetch that content so if the app or content is uh hugely popular it can mean millions and millions of users stamping getting back to your origin to get to the latest piece of content so the Legacy architecture uh adopters implemented something called mid-tier caching which you see here um and that uh meant uh quote unquote only tens of thousands of servers um were acting as origin for the last mile caches um but those were still going back to your origin server in order to get that fresh copy of content or that updated piece of content and then on top of that content has uh become increasingly more real time um devops and continuous integration and deployment has become a thing not only to improve developer workflows but also so that businesses could iterate faster and all these factors presented the edge architectures of the past with harder and harder problems to solve storing an outdated copy uh outdated stale copy of a web page is bad having multiple increasingly older and increasing uh incorrect versions of content apis or even full entire Edge application is way way worse so um even with these deep Last Mile caches and the mid tiers in play the socalled Thundering Herd was still headed to your Origins more often than not and a vertical it's a vertical and horizontal scaling problem that we implemented the CDN Edge to solve for in the first place then you add in things like B and Bad actors who are out to exploit scrape or do worse to these applications and things just start to get really gnarly so the other thing they I'll note is that on this diagram uh there's actually no observability or visibility real visibility in what's happening at the edge you know on these Legacy architectures maybe in 24 24 48 hours you're going to get a log dump but that does absolutely nothing to help you diagnose or troubleshoot what's going on in real time uh the other thing that's not depicted here is there's no way to invalidate what's living out at the edge in anything like the time you need is a developer who has the business breathing down your neck to fix the wrong headline the wrong inventory count or some other piece of business critical or brand critical data that's living out there on the internet so enter fastly what's different in the modern CDN and non fastly first of all uh we deploy large pops located at the major crossroads of the internet not in deep in the last smile so this is where the internet comes together and interconnects with all the other disperate networks around the world this means Consolidated CPU uh disk network uh and it means greater efficiencies in caching and compute and that translates to better control and availability for you your website or your application and because we are at the major crossroads of the internet the latency and performance of our network is as good if not better than Legacy cdns uh you can check this out for yourself uh in the public uh uh third party stats at sedexus actually uh I think if somebody can drop that link into the chat for everyone that' be great and you can see the latency metrics for yourself like this is a third party independent measurement um and so it's not our numbers it's somebody else measuring everybody out there together um and looking at the dynamic object delivery is probably one of the best ways to get a sense of the latency performance of uh of Any Given Edge Network so the compute density in our MEAP poops uh means that you can run complex application logic and you configuration scripts or even full-blown apps in our computered Edge product all right at the edge and in line of the delivery request flow of the users touching your apps and websites you add to that request collapsing or what we call shielding and uh that means that there aren't tens of thousands of mid-tier requests coming back to your origin just one maybe two requests if you have redundant shielding enabled so translation is there's no thundering her you add insecurity an inline we application API for protection firewall that's partly it's actually part the reclus flow back to the app and have it in blocking mode because it actually it can actually tell the difference between legitimate users and Bad actors and an API interface to control the to all of this that allows you to control the entire Edge platform so that you can programmatically access it directly from your developer workflows and have it propagate changes and updates around the world in in seconds not in minutes or hours instant Purge allows you to cash and validate with an average of50 milliseconds or less and you take these two things together and that means that you have near realtime control of not just the copies of your content around the world but the application logic but the application logic that dictates how the content will be rendered as well and then then there's observability which I mentioned earlier the ability to see what's actually happening with your app in your real time so that you can react to it troubleshoot it analyze it uh to improve business outcomes and user experience and it's not just a basic log stream either but one where you can actually customize pretty much everything you want to capture a user ID with a given AB test flow get it in your fastly logs you need latency Telemetry for a given Geo region get it in your fastly logs you need an audit Trail for compliance get it in your fastly logs and that's all customizable and at your fingertips so taken together these are enormously powerful toolkits in a modern development environment and that development environment should include your modern CDM so what is a modern CDM uh I've talked through a lot of many of these capabilities in the earlier slide uh and a modern CDN should have all these features and more but the key thing I really want you to take away from this conversation is that a modern CDN should be part of your development process and journey not an afterthought or blocker uh but a toolkit that actually enables you to achieve your goals business or personal uh and not an emergency once you hit scale ultimately a modern CDN should enable you and your developer teams to accelerate iterating and innovating Google's P Ranch page page rank algorithms excuse me measure page load times which is a function of latency and having content hot in caches so modern C has to be fast and performant to automatically improve your search rankings it should also be well peered or connected network-wise with Google and several of the other search engines that are out there again I refer you back to the sedexus uh uh page ranks or uh latency metrics uh is something that you can quickly use to evaluate performance you should be able to customize your content at the edge imagine the AB testing use cases if you could push that out to the edge and dynamically render content depending on the user input and still get all the visibility you need to make the adjustments of the user experience or optimize Revenue uh security should be native and at the edge and you should have the ability to do more than the basic cashing configuration to a truly run application logic and indeed entire application uh entire applications at the edge the list just goes on let's talk about some real world examples ganette is the largest news publisher in the United States and is known for building trusted local communities it is perhaps most well known for USA Today in publishing uh cash and validation or what we call instant Purge is critical to making the latest headlines and uh and news news uh always fresh but consider the possibilities of having 150 millisecond Purge time in a nutshell canet was able to consider fastly as a direct near realtime globally distributed extension of their origin servers the homepage of ganet Might properly be considered uh uncashable or and sered dynamically it's highly customized uh there's lots of content on it that's constantly being updated the headlines and so on um and so serve dynamically means that it's direct it's coming directly from their origin servers in the cloud and because they always need to have the latest up uh news and up-to-date headlines the reality is that they're actually Dynamic on an event like uh on an event uh like a breaking news update or a comment being posted or a like button being clicked um that's an event that can be captured and programmatically used to trigger a purge request via API and so with a purge and with instant Purge this becomes their new reality it offloaded a tremendous infrastructure burden while enabling them to move application logic out to the edge they saw 98. 86 Improvement percent Improvement in the global configuration push time from their previous setup and by offloading all that origin traffic to fastly they saw 35% cost Savings in erress stripe is another favorite example of mine processes uh they process about a billion dollars a year uh with really unpredictable uh um traffic spikes from flash sales and and holiday searches their business requires them to not just be secure but also highly performant as in as introducing a delay in the checkout process can mean a lost sale for their customers and directly relates to revenue for stri traffic spikes are normal business for them right they just have to be able to absorb that they have to be able to do that and they have to continue to process transactions for their end customer so having an edge platform that could scale to meet those spikes without allowing the stampeding her back to their origin servers was really really key and that's a lesson that they learned firsthand from their previous provider on top of that there's this two second rule on slow page loads that causes the user that you know reportedly causes the user to leave their cart or find the product on another site so they the the End customer ends up losing a transaction if stripe is too slow so stripe really needs to continually improve performance in order to make prevent loss of sales for their customers by integrating set fastly into their Edge application platform stripe was able to reduce their checkout times by 80% and that's an incredible and dramatic Improvement in the customer experience so how do you choose a modern CDM you know here's what to look for before buying um you know the First Column here is all about developers so I mentioned earlier a modern CDN should be part of your development process right not something that you're thinking about after the the fact or that you're bolting on later if you actually take advantage of it uh from the get-go as you're starting out the benefits for it are all there for you and the rest of the business but also and perhaps more importantly for your developer teams which allows them uh to iterate and innovate faster and hopefully your developers will really appreciate that from the get-go and it allows you to F focus on solving the business challenges and improving user experiences control observability standards compliance and support um and and built-in program programmability for security these are all key features that you should expect to see the second column uh is really about answering the business needs uh goals and objectives that you're faced with total cost of ownership always matters uh evaluating the impact to Cloud address and how many servers you need to run in ec2 or whatever it might be in order to support the cashing caching architecture you have is just as important to the conversation and lastly try try before you buy right this isn't circuit 2000 or 2005 or even 2010 anymore you have the ability to try before before you buy today and you should evaluate the support a true Edge platform like a modern CDN is one that can be integrated and is integral to your business in stack and personally I try to choose partners and vendors and customers who I can be proud of doing business with so there's some numbers on here um that uh that we're really proud of um we've scaled our Network to nearly 200 terabits per second while maintaining the performance of our Purge in global deploy times that's that's a not a that's a not in substantial accomplishment uh it's a pretty hard distributed computing problem um and we're pretty proud of that that uh all of our performance metrics have continued to improve as we've achieve scale um our next gen Waf has over 90% of our customers use it in full blocking mode which means they trust us to actually stop Bad actors and Bots without turning away real legitimate users and that's incredibly important because if the W is just sitting there in monitoring mode you're going to find out that there was a problem after the fact having it in full blocking mode means being able to trust that the technology and the security research behind the WAFF is world class and is actually going to find the bad guys and let the real real good folks through to continue to interact with your app or make that purchasing uh transaction but perhaps most importantly and the numb that we're most proud of is that we really genuinely love customers uh we've all been customers at one point or another in our lives and a genuine appreciation for how we want to be treated as customers means that we try to treat all of you the same way that we want to be treated ourselves so these customer metrics reflect uh our ongoing continuing commitment to this philosophy so with that um thank you for listening in today and I'll throw it back to you Lee you so much just as a reminder please feel free to type in your questions and we will answer those um now and if we can't get to them we can follow up with you after um so go ahead and type in any questions that you might have drop the screen share while we're wait for that so um I see one coming in it looks like there was um some question maybe go into more about having that full control for the developer and what that might mean yeah that's a great question so um you know that that can take a lot of different forms there there's two pieces to that right uh control means that you can uh interact with the uh the configuration um the cache control headers uh the content that's actually living in a cach there's a wide variety of things that you want to be able to control in a modern CDN in an edge caching store energy um so uh a you need to be able to access it it can't be a black box right so uh fastly provides that by API or through the control panel which is actually dog fooding the API um but more importantly that when you make those changes that they propagate around the world to every node that's carrying your traffic or your configuration uh pretty darn quickly so 13 Mill 13sec uh deploy time means that Within seconds your configuration changes are propagated around the world and they're being applied as rules to the traffic that we're serving for you um the other piece to it is uh what are you controlling and why are you making changes and so that goes back to observability if you can't see the impact of the changes that you're making um in your real time like if you're waiting hours or sometimes days for that uh change to be reflected in logs or any other visibility uh or observability tooling that you might have that's actually kind of useless like you could have a really bad configuration change out there that is maybe not taking the site down but has uh swapped the logo out for something else that might have a brand impact so observability and control both have a real-time nature to it and that is how developers operate today and that's something that we believe in really strongly also looks like um just fastly support web standards and open-source software we do uh at multiple levels right like it's baked into the stack uh so we support quick um hb3 uh there's a wide variety of web standards that we uh uh both support on the platform and we also are active with the ITF and the other standards bodies um uh to help set the standards themselves on top of that we also have a really robust open source uh Support Program which we we're pretty proud of uh um and so this is about uh supporting the delivery uh of Open Source projects um code um uh repos and and the other things that you might pull down right so uh npm and several other major packages are distributed through fastly um so I think uh I don't know the exact context of the question but I would say that uh we support it on the platform so that you can work with it uh for the most part that's well covered in docs. fast.com um we support it from the perspective of uh having a voice um and lending our experience and perspective to the setting of these standards uh and then for the open source projects um we actually offer free services for delivery uh to make sure that um open source projects are are actually being able to be used by the folks that are interested in using them awesome and I think we have one last one here that I see is um talking a little bit about like Live Events um as you have those thundering herds and how how does fast fastly help scale to meet those needs I know you touched a little bit on that yeah so this problem I live I've lived personally uh and had it go really really well and had it go really really bad um you know when you think of uh Live Events uh and the Thundering Herd problem uh you know it's the the the first one that usually comes to mind for me is is something like the Super Bowl right uh so so every year millions and millions of folks tune in for American uh football uh and the world championship and so uh that's very different than say your normal weekend and so for this 4H hour block of time there's millions of people's coming in trying to to hit this one video stream uh across you know multiple Renditions and bit rates so it's a it's sort of a spike uh traffic problem and it's a really big one right it's measured in terabits per second tens and hundreds of terabits of second um but if you peel that back for a second that actually applies to just about any kind of event like you can have a piece of content go viral right and then all of a sudden you've got a Thundering Herd problem um you could have uh a news breaking news thing that happens and it can be a Thundering Herd problem and it doesn't have to be gigantic and Global it can actually be super local and Regional something like a tornado alert um could apply to this uh as well uh or a local uh event that maybe has suddenly a bunch of Interest so um the way that uh cdns actually handled this is this is what CDN were designed for to begin with right it wasn't just a distribution problem it was also a horizontal and vertical scaling problem just by storing copies of the cach out there so um every CDN should be able to handle this and modern CDN in particular should be able to handle it without overwhelming your origin and that's the final component here what we call and refer to as shielding is this IDE aidea that we carry all of that traffic at Edge because we have a fresh copy of the content either through our edges uh our Edge caches or through our shielded pops and so really only one or two requests go back to origin Legacy CDN don't uh have the same benefit there they have uh many thousands of mid-tier caches all of which need to talk to origin in order to get that piece of content and then and then push it out to the edges uh so um the the approach that uh we've taken we've definitely seen and we and our customers have definitely seen that there's a tremendous amount of benefit when it comes to spike traffic like that awesome that thank you so much Lee that looks like the last of the questions so thank you for the presentation and thank thank you to all of you for joining us we really do appreciate your time you all be receiving an email with a link to the recording of today's webinar and if you'd like to check out fastly for yourself you can visit fastly.com and click on the tri fastly free button and with that I hope you all have a great rest of your day and thanks again for joining thanks everyone appreciate it take care