Fundamentals

An application programming interface (API) facilitates communication between technology products and systems. It is sometimes said that APIs…

A cache is a location that temporarily stores data for faster retrieval by the things that need to access it. Caching refers to the process of storing this data.

A content delivery network, or CDN, is a network of servers distributed all across the world that work together to make delivering content…

Image optimization refers to the process of creating and delivering high-quality images in the right format, dimension, and resolution for…

Cache invalidation, otherwise known as purging or cache purge, is the process of eliminating content from cache ahead of when it would naturally expire or be evicted. Once content is purged, a request for that content will be retrieved from the source rather than the cache.

If you own a website or application, you need to find the best way to deliver it to users. Using a content delivery network (CDN) can…

Let's get started by creating a Fastly account and logging in to the Fastly web interface. We can sign up for a free trial — no credit card information is required.

In this section, we'll explore some of the edge features available to our Fastly service. For example, we'll configure Fastly to serve synthetic responses to certain types of requests, enable compression of our assets, and configure a streaming logging endpoint so we can see who's visiting our website.

When it comes to caching your website or web application's content, Fastly provides a wide variety of options. Fastly caches most content by default, but most people will want or need to customize their caching settings. You have complete control over what content is cached, and for how long that content is cached.

We've done a lot of work to prepare our Fastly service for the Taco Labs website! Now it's time to put the finishing touches on things so we can go live and start using Fastly for our production website.

In this section, we’ll provide some tips and tricks for dealing with those day-to-day website issues and headaches that come with the territory. Call it advanced configuration. We’ll talk about using custom VCL to add redirects, using the API to purge the cache, and purging with surrogate keys.

That’s a wrap! We’ve successfully started using Fastly to cache our static website. Go ahead, visit https://www.tacolabs.com — or whatever domain name you’ve been using to follow along with — and marvel at how fast the site loads. And give yourself a pat on the back for doing all of the legwork!

Images are an important part of your website or application. To ensure that your images load quickly, you should optimize each image for…

Let's get started by picking up where we left off in Introduction to Fastly's CDN . At that end of that tutorial, we had a fully-functional…

There are two ways Fastly IO can interact with our images. The first is by using the default settings we specify in the Fastly web interface…

We've enabled Fastly IO, configured the default settings, and verified that Fastly IO is automatically transforming all of the images on our…

That's it! We've successfully enabled and configured Fastly IO for Taco Labs. Go ahead, visit https://io.tacolabs.com — or whatever domain…