cdnplanet’s CDN Finder is showing most Fastly sites (including this forum) as using Amazon CloudFront or Cloudflare. Why doesn’t Fastly use Fastly? Does Fastly not trust its own product?
This site is hosted by the company behind Discourse, as SaaS. Since that company hasn’t chosen to use Fastly in front of their sites, this site does not use Fastly. We could of course put Fastly in front of it anyway if we chose to, but that doesn’t seem like it would provide much value and risks complicating the support situation with the vendor.
Fastly Academy is likely the same situation, it’s a hosted vendor solution (Skilljar, I think), and they choose how to manage their network resources.
If you are aware of any other Fastly sites using non-Fastly CDNs please let us know, we definitely try to use our own products for as many of our site as we are able!
The support site is using Cloudflare too. Seems like everything Fastly does relies on Cloudflare and/or Cloudfront.
Does Fastly use Cloudfront and Cloudflare for CDN services too?
The support site is Zendesk, which falls into the same category as the others mentioned above.
“everything Fastly does” is a bit of an exaggeration; our primary corporate site (https://www.fastly.com) and all of its sub-sites are definitely hosted on Fastly itself (using a number of our products, including both Deliver and Compute). The same is true of https://docs.fastly.com, and likely many other sites we operate.
There is another way to consider this though: would you want Fastly’s support site to be down if the Fastly network itself was experiencing outages? There’s a good reason why many tech companies ‘share the burden’ of their various sites across a number of networks and technology providers, because in some cases that improves resiliency.
I’d be more worried that Fastly still built in a way that allows mass outages. After the June/2021 I would think Fastly should be based on microservices. Can changes still break everything at once? Is it still the same Varnish system that broke on June 8th 2021?
Actually it looks like even the main site https://www.fastly.com is using AWS Cloudfront for caching images. Does Fastly not offer image cache or does AWS Cloudfront offer some advantages over Fastly?
Your questions about the architecture of Fastly’s platform are a different topic and I’m certainly not in a position to answer them I’ve reported the unexpected usage of CloudFront to our website team, thanks for noticing that.
The answer from the web team was that one of the third-party scripts on the site is pulling content via CloudFront, so there’s not much we can do about that. If you become aware of any first-party (Fastly-controlled) content on our site that is not delivered from our CDN, we would definitely want to know about it.