Fast Forward
Let’s build the good internet. Together.
The internet is a pretty neat place.
It’s where the world’s most creative minds gather to build things that benefit everyone. Open source, open standards, or just the open internet — with every contribution, you make the internet even better.
But we know you can’t do it alone.
We see you. And we want to support you.
Are you in?Stay connected with Fast Forward
Let’s build a more trustworthy internet
Dream big, improve lives
At the heart of our work, we believe in:
Enabling everyone to build
Empowering developers, and the languages, tools, and platforms they use.The good, fun internet
Protecting individuality and community, empowering creativity, and celebrating whimsy.Guarding your privacy
You should be free to be yourself and be protected online.Equitable connections
Everyone should have access to a fast and secure internet connection.
Collaboration is key
These values are core to the way we operate:
Open
Not only are licenses important but sharing and showing your work is essential.Community-oriented & inclusive
We want well-moderated communities that care about each other and the world.Friendly to new contributors
Everyone is welcomed with well-documented codebases and onramps.Trust
We champion integrity and build with security by default.
How we grow the open internet
Fast Forward Program
To nurture and support those who share our vision of an open internet that is fast and secure for all, we extend free services to eligible open source projects and nonprofits that support them.
Learn moreBuilding the open internet
As a critical component of the internet infrastructure community, we feel responsible for contributing our expertise to the communal body of knowledge that makes up internet standards.
Learn moreOur contributions
Many of our products are built on or use open source technologies, and maintainers and contributors gather on Glitch to build the open web. We encourage Fastlyans to contribute back to open source projects and open source our own technology whenever possible.
Learn moreOur customer community
Just as we choose to hire individuals who are good people—who are trustworthy and who demonstrate integrity—we choose to work with customers and partners who have integrity, are trustworthy, and reflect our values.
Learn moreFast Forward Program
Proudly powering open source — for free
Your work inspires us. You build meaningful, indispensable tools that make the internet work and improve people’s lives. And you do it, often without pay or thanks, and typically in your spare time. That’s awesome.
We’re here to catalyze your creativity — because you should never worry about what your project’s success will cost you.
You focus on building the next big thing. We’ll make it faster, safer, and better.
ApplyStay informed about our community
Read about Fast Forward and program members
Blog
What does it take to power the Python Package Index?
Who—and what—keeps PyPI running is still fairly opaque to its users. Many don’t realize that unlike other registries for similar language ecosystems, PyPI is a project supported by the Python Software Foundation (a 501(c)(3) non-profit) and almost entirely volunteer-led and maintained.
Blog
Why it’s imperative to be open, transparent, and collaborative
In just twenty short years, we’ve gone from dial-up and downtime to XR and AI. Technology has advanced at lightning speed, but one thing has stayed constant: The most powerful thing about the internet isn’t the technology it’s built on; it’s the people building and using it.
Blog
How Khan Academy Successfully Handled 2.5x Traffic in a Week
Within just two weeks in March 2020, Khan Academy site usage grew to 2.5x what it was at the same time last year and has sustained that level to date. Khan Academy was able to respond, offering high-quality content and classroom experience — for free. In the month of April, we served 30 million learners on our platform.
Blog
Impressive statistics from our mirror service
At Fosshost, we offer several services for the FOSS community. One such service is the Mirror-as-a-Service. We run it in partnership with Fastly CDN to provide mirrors for open-source projects across several geographical locations. A list of these locations is available on Fastly's website.
SERVING OPEN SOURCE SINCE 2014
Our customer community
Serving the best of the internet
The phrase “you’re only as good as the company you keep” is a guiding principle. It speaks not just to the conduct and business ethics of Fastly’s employees, it extends to our partners, customers, and the internet. Doing what’s right for our network and the brands who want to be there benefits not only our employees and customers, but everyone. We choose to work with customers and partners that we believe have integrity, are trustworthy, and who reflect Fastly’s values.
Fastly Labs
Fastly Labs is where you’ll find our open source projects and experimental developer tooling — we created Labs to get our newest ideas into your hands faster, so you can keep building your great idea at the edge. Have fun.
Check it outStandards and Protocols
WebAssembly/ WASI
Wasm is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine and is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications. The WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) is a capability-based set of standardized host APIs.
Fastly uses these two standards to enable per-request isolation and lightweight sandboxing for our serverless environment, Compute@Edge.
Learn moreHTTP3/ QUIC
QUIC is a new, ground-breaking transport layer network protocol; over 1 billion people already use QUIC every day as part of what they do on the web.
Fastly is a member of the working group which developed QUIC, as well as HTTP/3, which operates on top of QUIC. In April 2022, we enabled QUIC and HTTP/3 for our entire customer base at no additional charge.
Learn morePrivate Relay
Private Relay uses a dual-hop architecture to disguise information like your IP address and DNS records, preventing your personal information from being shared with your internet provider or the websites you visit.
Fastly contributed to defining the standard for Private Relay and serves as a third-party content provider for requests sent through Private Relay.
Learn morePasskeys
Based on industry standards for account authentication, Passkeys are easier to use than passwords and far more secure. Passkeys replace passwords with cryptographic key pairs, which prevents them from being guessable and keeps them safe from nefarious activities like server hacks or phishing.
Fastly worked with our partners at Apple, alongside Microsoft and Google, to develop and standardize the technology behind Passkeys.
Private Access Tokens
Private Access Tokens are an alternative to CAPTCHAs for supported client platforms. They use careful application of cryptography and requirements to guarantee that a website learns only exactly what it needs to know about a user to provide access to a resource.
Fastly worked with our partners at Apple, alongside Microsoft and Google, to develop and standardize the technology behind PATs.
Learn moreOur Projects
Wasmtime/ Cranelift
Wasmtime is a fast and secure runtime for WebAssembly, built on Cranelift, a low-level retargetable code generator, which quickly generates high-quality machine code either at runtime or ahead-of-time. Wasmtime is optimized for efficient instantiation, low-overhead calls between the embedder and Wasm, and scalability of concurrent instances.
Learn morewit-bindgen
This project is a bindings generator framework for WebAssembly programs and embeddings of WebAssembly. With wit-bindgen, language ecosystems can add support for the WebAssembly component model. This makes it easy to mix code from different language ecosystems into the same application in a performant and safe way.
Learn morePushpin
Pushpin is a proxy server that pins client connections open, making it easy to build realtime API endpoints. Pushpin supports HTTP streaming, HTTP long-polling, and WebSockets. Since Pushpin is a proxy server, the backend can be written in any language. Convenience libraries are available to make integration easy.
Learn moreH2O
H2O is an optimized HTTP server which can also be used as a library. It’s very fast, providing much quicker responses to end-users.
Learn moreQuicly
Quicly is a modular IETF QUIC protocol implementation, designed primarily for use within the H2O HTTP server.
WAF Efficacy
The WAF efficacy framework provides a standardized way to measure the effectiveness of a WAF’s detection capabilities. It provides the ability to perform continuous assessments of simulated attacks to test different attack types and distills the results into an overall score that can be used for point-in-time knowledge, or trends of effectiveness.
Learn moreApply for the Fast Forward Program
We proudly support open source projects, and the foundations that support them, with free services.
We can’t wait to get to know you. To apply, fill out the form and let us know how your project is:
Open
Community-oriented
Friendly to new contributors
Inclusive
Built on trust
If you’re eligible, we’ll reach out for more information about your technical needs!