⏩ Welcome thread — say hi!

Fast Forward
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Hi, everyone. Welcome to Fastly’s dev community forum! This is a place for you to ask technical questions, show off what you’re working on, share product feedback, and perhaps wax philosophical about the state of open source — in other words, it’s a space for you.

But before we get carried away, this here is a thread for you to introduce yourself! I’ll start.

I’m your friend and Fast Forward community manager Hannah. I just reached a milestone of three years managing Fastly’s open source program — it’s been so wonderful getting to know so many of you, learning about your impactful projects, and supporting your work.

I’m fascinated by community systems. In a previous life, I worked as a study coordinator in a communications laboratory, studying social and knowledge networks in distributed working groups, online communities, and virtual teams. That’s what brought me to the world of open source. To me, open source is a shining example of the power of people in community. And through my work on Fast Forward and in this community, I hope to help build systems that galvanize openness, collaboration, and kindness.

Outside of work, I’m a core organizer for an annual charitable event in Chicago called CHIditarod (a food drive, fundraiser, and costumed shopping cart race). Chicago, where I live, is rife with food deserts — CHIditarod seeks to bring awareness to the issue and alleviate it. The event has generated 257,419 lbs of food for the Greater Chicago Food Depository and raised $653,779 for our grant program.

Also, I love birds, books, and art of all kinds.

Your turn! Tell us about yourself, your project, how people can contribute to it, or whatever you like.

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Hi all! I’m the Vice President of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, and the Rocky Linux Project Manager.

Fastly was one of the first partners of the Rocky Linux project, all of our web downloads are powered by Fastly CDN. We’re thrilled to be a part of the Fast Forward program!

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Welcome, Brian!! And congrats on receiving the “First Poster Ever” badge. :slight_smile:

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Hi folks!

I’m Neil Hanlon, one of the co-founders of Rocky Linux and the lead for the Infrastructure team over there. I’ve been involved in open source for as long as I can remember in one form or another, and working on Rocky has been an absolute delight, especially with as Brian mentions, support from our partners like Fastly.

Outside of work, I like to play music, tinker with electronics, cook (but not clean ;)), and read (especially Fantasy)

Looking forward to getting to know everyone here!

–Neil

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Welcome, Neil! We’re so glad to have you here, and in Fast Forward :hugs:

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Hello,

I’m Paul Norman, an OpenStreetMap developer and sysadmin. OpenStreetMap is a crowd-sourced map of the world that anyone can contribute to. I’ve been working on OpenStreetMap software in one form or another for over a decade, and as a sysadmin I manage most of our tile caching setup on Fastly.

We use Fastly for the OpenStreetMap Standard layer, the default map on openstreetmap.org. The Standard layer is also used by many other sites and projects. It is built up of 256x256 pixel PNGs which are arranged in a grid, and then right PNGs are requested by the client and assembled into an image. This makes the map highly cachable, as two people viewing an overlapping area will have requests in common.

We peak at 50k requests/second served for a total of 70 billion requests/month and 881 TB/month, served to about half a billion users. I believe we have users from every country on Earth, and Antarctica.

Our monitoring is public, with a CDN dashboard, backend dashboard, and aggregated logs published that go over what parts of the map were viewed, and apps/websites that used us. We’re doing some custom monitoring which lets us see the health check results from Fastly, letting us see network problems between CDN nodes and our backends.

Our logging is fairly well developed. We have Fastly logs sent to S3, then every day we run Athena queries which turn the gzipped CSV logs into Parquet logs which take far less space and are faster to query. I recommend this approach to avoid querying several TB of logs. It’s from these logs that the aggregate logs are published.

The backend to the standard tile layer consists of servers in Europe, Australia, and the US. We direct traffic based on CDN POP to an appropriate set of backends and load-balance between them. In Europe, where we have the most traffic, we load-balanced based on request URL in a custom way, so as you pan the map, if the cache misses, your requests are served by different backends based on where you’re viewing.

Prior to Fastly, we used to manage our own CDN on donated resources from ISPs, universities, internet hubs, hosting companies, and other resources. This was a lot more work, and didn’t work as well as Fastly. We had to manage the software, but we also had to manage relationships with dozens of different hosts and networks.

We also use Fastly to accelerate our Discourse site, but that’s a few requests per second and not very interesting.

If you want to contribute to OpenStreetMap, you can go to the website, create an account, and edit and improve your local area. When you map where you know, I map where I know, and we all share the results, we end up with a map everyone can use and contribute to.

For future changes to how we use Fastly, the biggest is that we want to get our configuration into Chef where it can be properly managed in git. This will also make most of it public, so anyone can see what we’ve done, improve it, or use it for their own config. We’re also looking at serving vector tiles, but the CDN setup for that will be essentially the same as our current raster tiles, just a different content-type.

I originally had links to the dashboards and software in this post, but because I’m a new Discourse user, I had to remove all but two. If you can’t find anything, feel free to ask for specific links.

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Actually the plan was to use terraform for that rather than chef but the effect is much the same.

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Hello! :wave:

I help support the Django web framework through my role on the Ops Team.

We’re grateful to Fastly for the support, and it’s a pleasure to meet everyone!

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Welcome, Paul!! Nice write-up :eyes::clap:

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Hello, everyone! I’m Gabe, the maintainer of Owncast the free and open source, self-hosted, independent live video streaming and chat server.

We’re using Fastly in front of some of our project resources and demo instances, and that’s obviously helpful. But the real benefit is to have CDN availability in hopes of finding easy to use and affordable solutions for independent streamers. The long term goals are to find ways for live streamers to improve their performance, scaling globally just like Big Tech can.

While the idea of a CDN to most people who run Owncast comes off as complicated, I’m hoping it can be eventually condensed down and simplified into something that these indie streamers can take advantage of by more people.

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Hey Gabe, welcome! So glad you’re here :smiley:

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Hey all :wave: Chairman on the Eclipse Adoptium project here! Thanks so much for agreeing to sponsor our Fastly CDN! I’ve been playing around with my demo account for a while (see me learning Fastly here: Fastly configuration for JFrog artifactory - #18 by noguxun)

Looking forward to working with Fastly!

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Hi George!! We’re so glad you’re here :fast_forward:

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Hi everyone!

This is Anton from the Hephy Workflow OSS project. We are a self-hosted Platform as a Service (PaaS) built on top of Kubernetes. We forked the project a long time ago when Microsoft bought Deis and maintained it for free for our employers at the time and now for our own personal enjoyment. Compared to all the other cool projects here we are a much smaller project. We were looking for a way to cut our AWS bill and host static website (docs and blog) for Hephy Workflow, along with our docker images and helm charts if possible. Fastly seemed like a great fit and so we applied!

Very happy to be part of the program and hope we can make Fastly our new favorite host for interfacing with our users.

Cheers,
Anton

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We’re so thrilled you’re here, Anton!! Welcome to Fast Forward :fast_forward:

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Hello everyone!

I’m happy to introduce O3O Foundation to you all. We are a non-profit project based in Canada, with a mission to serve Chinese language users worldwide by hosting FOSS tools and platforms. Our primary focus is on providing open-source, privacy-conscious services and tools, empowering users to access information freely and securely.

In regions like China, where internet surveillance and censorship are prevalent, our services are more than just tools, they are lifelines. They provide a means for users to communicate securely and freely, without fear of surveillance or censorship.

With a growing user base exceeding 20,000, we are dedicated to promoting freedom of speech and safeguarding digital sovereignty.

We are thrilled to be a part of Fastly’s Fast Forward program. We believe that Fastly’s CDN will significantly enhance the performance and accessibility of our services. We’re excited to be a part of this community and look forward to collaborating.

Best,
O3O Foundation

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Hello!!! :slight_smile: and welcome to Fast Forward :fast_forward: :heart:

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Hello!

This is Justin from Terms of Service Didn’t Read,

ToS;DR is your go-to destination for unraveling the mysteries hidden within those lengthy and often confusing Terms of Service agreements. As we traverse the vast digital landscape, signing up for various platforms, it’s easy to overlook the legal jargon that governs our online interactions. That’s where ToS;DR steps in.

Our platform provides concise and user-friendly summaries of the terms of service for a wide array of online services. From social media giants to e-commerce platforms, we’ve got you covered. But we’re not just about summaries – our community rates and reviews these terms, giving you insights into how user-friendly and fair they are.

We’re happy to be supported by Fastly so we can reduce our operating costs and make ToS;DR faster!

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Welcome to Fast Forward, and to Fastly Connect, Justin!! We’re so happy to have you here :revolving_hearts:

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Hi everyone,

This is Nick Vidal from the Open Source Initiative!

Our work revolves around 3 grand areas: licensing and legal, policy and standards, and advocacy and outreach. As the steward of the Open Source Definition, license and legal have been part of our core program since the very beginning of our foundation. We serve as an anchor for open community consensus on what constitutes Open Source. We protect the Open Source principles, enforcing the marks “Certified Open Source” and “Open Source Approved License”. Under policy and standards, we have monitored policy and standards setting organizations, supporting legislators and policy makers educating them about the Open Source ecosystem, its role in innovation and its value for an open future. Lastly, under advocacy and outreach, we are leading global conversations with non-profits, developers and lawyers to improve the understanding of Open Source principles and practice. OSI investigates the impacts of ongoing debates around Open Source, from artificial intelligence to cybersecurity.

We look forward to working together with Fastly and its community, particularly on the work around defining Open Source AI. We believe Open Source AI on the edge will be beneficial for organizations and individuals for various reasons, among which privacy, security, and performance. Small specialized models running on the edge will allow organizations to own their data, use less resources, and provide better results. Fastly is well positioned to help in this regard and having a clear definition will help drive AI in this direction.

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