Fastly, Inc., the world’s fastest global edge cloud platform, today announced the relaunch of its industry-leading Open Source and Nonprofit Program as “Fast Forward,” with a renewed focus on building community among the builders and maintainers of an internet that is faster, safer, and more inclusive. The announcement was made at Altitude, Fastly’s annual flagship customer conference.
Fast Forward is a set of broad-reaching programs designed to empower and support open source projects, nonprofit organizations, and developers in their endeavors to build great things with unmatched ease, performance, and security. Extending Fastly’s deep commitment to open source, Fast Forward will offer free services to open source projects and the nonprofits that support them. Fast Forward will also establish and foster a community of these stakeholders so they can interact with and learn from one another, as well as with the broader developer and open source community.
Fast Forward stems from Fastly’s mission to help make the internet a better place, where all experiences are fast, engaging, and safe. At its core, Fastly is driven to be part of an industry that is open, transparent and collaborative – working together to expand and preserve resilience, portability, and interoperability. Fastly believes companies that operate at a global scale are responsible for contributing their expertise to the communal body of knowledge which makes up the open internet: standards, protocols, open source technology, and policies.
“Providing Fastly’s best in class services to open source projects and standards initiatives has the power to drive our shared mission of making the internet a better place, It’s important for us to support the organizations that fuel Internet innovation”
- Fastly CEO Todd Nightingale
Fast Forward is just one element of Fastly’s rich heritage in open source and open standards: Fastly is a founding member of the Bytecode Alliance along with Red Hat, Mozilla, and Intel; works alongside industry partners such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple and more to contribute to Private Access Tokens; and encourages its employees to contribute to open source through projects like Pushpin, WAF Efficacy, and more – just to name a few initiatives. Fastly also has a long-standing policy for its customer community, and only works with customers and partners who reflect Fastly’s values.
There’s so much great creativity on the internet that’s inspiring but doesn’t always have the support it deserves, Fast Forward is Fastly’s commitment to helping everyone build a better internet. From open source technologies, to the fundamental protocols and standards that make the internet go, we’re telling every developer and every creator that we’ve got their backs, no matter what technologies, tools or stacks they use. We can’t wait to see how they use that potential to build and scale an even better internet, said Anil Dash, VP of Developer Experience at Fastly.
Fastly’s investment in open source has provided valuable support to organizations like the Rust Software Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Scratch Foundation. Their leaders talk about the benefits they get from Fastly’s Fast Forward Program:
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Joel Marcey, Director of Operations and Advocacy at the Rust Foundation, said, As a non-profit organization supporting the Rust Project, the Rust Foundation believes the future of software development is looking brighter every day thanks to Rust's inherent benefits such as memory safety, energy efficiency, and scalability. But for the Rust Project to meet the demands of its growing popularity, diversified and cost-effective infrastructure is critical. The Rust Foundation is grateful to be included in the Fast Forward program, which will allow the Rust Project to harness Fastly's full-site delivery and powerful Compute@Edge platform at no cost. It's partnerships like these that will contribute to the growth and sustainability of Rust into the future.
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Daniel Gruno, Infrastructure Architect at the Apache Foundation, said, Fastly's sponsorship allowed The Apache Software Foundation to replace a complicated mirror infrastructure with a simple content delivery network (CDN) that is largely transparent to our projects and users. In addition, it's allowed the Infrastructure team to spend less time on our distribution network and more time on higher value projects for the foundation.
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Colby Gutierrez-Kraybill, Principal Software Engineer at Scratch Foundation, said, Thanks to Fastly's global reach and ongoing support, we are able to fulfill our mission at the Scratch Foundation of providing young people all over the world with digital tools and opportunities to imagine, create, share, and learn. We are grateful for Fastly's partnership, allowing us to stay flexible and agile as our platforms Scratch and ScratchJr grow globally as leading creative learning tools.
To qualify for free services through the Fast Forward Program, members must freely distribute their codebase and align with Fastly’s open source values: open, community oriented, inclusive, friendly to new contributors, and built on trust. If accepted, they in turn commit to sharing knowledge and resources with the Fast Forward community and beyond.
About Fastly
Fastly’s powerful and programmable edge cloud platform helps the world’s top brands deliver the fastest online experiences possible, while improving site performance, enhancing security, and empowering innovation at global scale. With world-class support that achieves 95%+ average annual customer satisfaction ratings, Fastly’s beloved suite of edge compute, delivery, and security offerings has been recognized as a leader by industry analysts such as IDC, Forrester and Gartner. Compared to legacy providers, Fastly’s powerful and modern network architecture is the fastest on the planet, empowering developers to deliver secure websites and apps at global scale with rapid time-to-market and industry-leading cost savings. Thousands of the world’s most prominent organizations trust Fastly to help them upgrade the internet experience, including Reddit, Pinterest, Stripe, Neiman Marcus, The New York Times, Epic Games, and GitHub.