Staging

Fastly's Staging feature allows customers to test changes to Delivery and Compute service configurations on a staging environment before deploying them to the production network.

You can stage a service version using the Fastly control panel, API, or CLI. You must modify your computer's hosts file or create a new DNS record to access a staged version of your service.

Prerequisites

Contact sales@fastly.com for more information on how to enable the Staging feature for your account.

Limitations and considerations

Fastly's Staging feature has the following limitations:

• To stage a service, you must deploy at least one production version of it.
• The Fastly control panel and API don't indicate whether or not changes have been made to a staged service version.
• There aren't any variables available that indicate whether or not code is running in a staging environment.
• Changes to domains, TLS configurations, WAF rules, and bot detection rules can't be staged.
• There's no shared cache between the staging and production environments.
• Changes made to versionless objects, like VCL snippets, will be reflected in both the staging and production environments.
• Fastly's Subscriber Provided Prefix has unique requirements that must be met before working with the Staging feature. Contact support to see if your organization meets those requirements.
• The IP address for your staging environment could change if you modify your TLS certificates. Always refer to the Fastly control panel to find the current IP address for your staging environment.

You can't stage services that use the following products and features:

• Fastly's Managed CDN (mCDN)
• Fastly's On-the-Fly Packager (OTFP)
• Image Optimizer
• Next-Gen WAF
• Service chaining
• Observability products, including Origin Inspector and Domain Inspector.
• Purging, including purging the staging environment via the API.
• Terraform. The Fastly provider doesn't support the Staging feature.

Stats and logging

Traffic to your staging environment can be logged separately from your production service. Stats and metrics—such as hits, misses, errors and response time—will not count towards the stats of your production version.

Billing

Traffic to staging services is not distinguished from traffic for production services for billing purposes and will be included with production traffic on your invoice. Refer to the pricing and billing information for any products used with the Staging feature.