Fastly Acquires Fanout to Unlock Real-Time App Development at the Edge

March 30, 2022 at 09:00 AM EDT

The Fanout acquisition adds best-of-the-web technology to Fastly’s portfolio in its pursuit to provide fast, safe and engaging experiences

Fastly, Inc. (NYSE: FSLY), the world’s fastest edge cloud network provider, today announced its acquisition of Fanout, a platform that makes it easy to build and scale real-time and streaming APIs such as live chat support, ecommerce, video streaming, gaming, collaborative editing, and more. The acquisition is part of Fastly’s broader growth strategy to identify and deploy technologies and talent that increase performance, security and innovation for customers.

Today, a digital experience’s speed and performance are key to customer engagement and conversion. The integration of Fanout technology into Fastly’s powerful network will help enable real-time app development at the edge with increased time-to-market, reduced friction, and unprecedented scale.

“With the addition of the Fanout technology into Fastly’s portfolio, it positions Fastly well to support customers that want to migrate away from existing, complicated in-house WebSocket stacks, as well as customers who don't have engineering resources to build a push architecture for real-time data and communications to any device, anywhere,” said IDC Research Vice President Ghassan Abdo. “To add this functionality into the same stack where applications are already being built should help resource-constrained developers at SMBs and enterprises alike.”

Fanout’s value to the Fastly platform is its revolutionary ability to:

Deliver real-time development that is transport agnostic. Fanout makes this happen without constraints on the number of connected clients and with true 1-to-many message fan-out.
Allow customers to use their existing HTTP origin instead of maintaining a complicated and expensive WebSocket or other push protocol messaging infrastructure dedicated solely to real-time app development
Streamline workflows efficiently and free developers to build the best possible experience for their users without having to waste time worrying about the intricacies of real-time protocols.

Fastly plans to integrate the Fanout proxy into its Compute@Edge serverless offering, enabling developers to build fully interactive real-time applications securely and at-scale within Fastly's massive edge network.

“We’ve always been driven to create the tools our customers need for building and delivering exceptional digital experiences behind the best of the web,” said Joshua Bixby, CEO of Fastly. “Integrating Fanout’s real-time application technology into ours gives developers a consistent development experience, empowering them to effortlessly upgrade their end-user experiences in a fraction of the time and with fewer resources. The integration will also allow customers to leverage Fastly’s global scale to support the needs of the largest enterprises.”

For more information, check out Fastly’s latest blog post, “Fastly + Fanout: why real-time messaging and edge computing are an amazing combination.”

About Fastly

Fastly is upgrading the internet experience to give people and organizations more control, faster content, and more dynamic applications. By combining the world’s fastest global edge cloud network with powerful software, Fastly helps customers develop, deliver, and secure modern distributed applications and compelling digital experiences. Fastly’s customers include many of the world’s most prominent companies, including Pinterest, The New York Times, and GitHub. For more information on our mission and products, visit https://www.fastly.com.

Source: Fastly, Inc.