The internet times are a'changing Fastly

Why is the internet fast? And with changing use cases for the internet, will it stay fast? Those questions go straight to both the start and the future of a company providing what it calls a Global Edge Cloud Platform - Fastly.

Humans, said Fastly co-founder Simon Wistow, are astonishingly sensitive to latency. "It's a funny thing. If you're waiting for a few seconds for an elevator, you get really frustrated, which is why they put mirrors on them…because if you're sitting there checking your hair or straightening your tie, it doesn't bother you as much. And Google has studies showing that for every 100 milliseconds of extra latency, they lose like 5% of their customers."

The simple answer to the opening query is that internet traffic travels at somewhere approaching the speed of light, attenuated of course, which covers a lap around the planet in just more than one tenth of a second. That won't happen in practice because shunting content around is inefficient and takes time, particularly in the accumulation of miniscule handover delays between various devices compounding to perceptibly slow things down. Of course, an entire movie or CAD file also doesn't transit at once, with the 'size of the pipes' playing a substantial role.

These challenges are overcome by putting content closer to where and how we need it, and that's the essence of an Edge Cloud Platform/Edge Computing and the business of Fastly. When copies of popularly accessed data are up the road rather than a continent away, the internet works far better. And faster.

Wistow is quick to point out that Fastly didn't invent the edge concept nor implementation of its predecessor, Content Delivery Networks (CDN) but instead arose out of sheer nerd frustration with existing providers. As he relates, cofounder Artur Bergman was running the pop culture wiki which eventually became Fandom; existing CDN providers weren't meeting the needs of dynamic web content.

So, Wistow and Bergman got to thinking.

"One thing that did help was that SSDs were becoming more available which was absolutely necessary to get really fast performance from the large caches and we'd need to cache that content. While people said 'they're expensive in dollars per gigabyte', we said, 'But they're cheap in dollars per I/O'."

The long and the short of it is that Fastly came into being because the nature of the internet had changed from the late 1990s through to the 2010s. Dynamic content replaced static as the execution of the 'multimedia' promised in 1999 became possible; today, the execution of AI has similarly materialised and is evolving the nature of the internet.

And as a result, Fastly is working to maintain the relevance of its Global Edge Platform, said Wistow, as traffic moves from human to machine. Already, he explained, around 50% of all web traffic is bots, leading toward the potentially perplexing - on the face of it - 'bot-first' web (this quickly stops being perplexing in the context of API calls between applications, or Answer Engines firing out queries underpinning responses to human commands.)

"This the most impactful thing that has happened to technology since the web, or the.com boom," Wistow declaimed. "Humans [internet users] are increasing, but bots are increasing even faster. We are turning into a bot majority and that is for the whole web."

Strategies for Fastly customers, Wistow explained, include differentiating between well-behaved bots from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, and malicious crawlers using 'headless browsers or EC2 instances to hammer sites'.

He added that in support of LLM-powered web traffic, Fastly is developing tools such as semantic caching, content labeling, and protection against data exfiltration and malicious prompts.

However, as one might imagine in a dynamic environment, he added there is inevitable uncertainty in how the changed use cases for the internet and content delivery are likely to play out.

"There is no one size fits all, and so we're talking to all our customers. We put them in contact with AI companies. We help broker licensing deals [between content owners and content retailers/streaming service providers]. If they want to block [access, for example geographically], we'll help them block. We can do that because we see such a big proportion of the internet and see these patterns of behaviour, and we're advocating on behalf of publishers for standards."

The enduringly dynamic internet obliges accelerators like Fastly to adapt and accommodate. As Wistow put it, "We're trying to make a better internet, one where we can move fast, stay safe, and we're more protected from [cyber-attacks], we're more protected from bots and what we call internet weather, you know, random cable breaks and so on. We want customers to know that just by being on Fastly, they can feel okay, they can relax by being on a better internet."

With a grin, Wistow admitted that the claim is bold. "It probably sounds a bit self-aggrandising. But, our customers come to us for that reason."