Cloudflare vs Fastly

About Fastly

Fastly is an edge cloud platform that helps companies deliver fast, secure, and reliable digital experiences. Fastly combines CDN, security (including WAF and DDoS protection), and edge computing so teams can control how content and applications are delivered and protected in real-time. Fastly describes one programmable platform to scale AI systems, protect content from bots, and run the edge with natural language. Fastly describes Secure as protecting apps and APIs from AI-scale threats. Fastly says it powers millions of mission-critical applications in thousands of the world's most digitally-advanced companies.^[3][5][6]

Fastly says its application security solutions are designed for security and resilience at global scale and help teams mitigate evolving threats and control bots. Fastly offers CDN for content delivery, WAF for application protection, DDoS mitigation, bot management, and edge compute solutions for running logic closer to users. Fastly says its products work together as a unified platform. Fastly refers to its global network as having 622 Tbps of capacity.^[5][6]

Fastly Next-Gen WAF is a web application firewall that monitors for suspicious and anomalous web traffic and protects, in real-time, against attacks directed at the applications and origin servers that customers specify. Fastly Next-Gen WAF now collectively refers to the products previously known as the Signal Sciences Cloud WAF and Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF. Fastly Next-Gen WAF continues to be powered by Signal Sciences technology. Next-Gen WAF identifies and tracks attacks across all of a customer's deployments and determines whether to flag the originating IP address as potentially problematic, rate limit the IP address or allow the request. Next-Gen WAF can be deployed in three different ways. The On-Prem WAF deployment consists of two components, the module and the agent. Cloud WAF deployment requires uploading a TLS certificate, adding an origin server using the Next-Gen WAF control panel, and updating DNS records. Next-Gen WAF customers receive threat intelligence through the Network Learning Exchange (NLX) feature, which adds a unique signal to information in the control panels.^[9]

Fastly DDoS Protection provides real-time visibility into and defense against common Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Fastly Client-Side Protection provides the ability to inventory and control resources such as scripts, images, and fonts.^[10]

Fastly describes Managed Security as 24/7 expert-managed WAF, bot, and DDoS threat protection. Managed Security Professional provides continuous monitoring of included Fastly security products and proactive action by Fastly in the event of an identified security incident. Managed Security Professional includes enhanced access to Fastly's Customer Security Operations Center (CSOC) and periodic consultation with a Designated Security Specialist. Managed Security Professional includes a quarterly report documenting events observed and actions taken, recommendations for configuration changes and maintenance, and product updates.^[5][11]

ARC is a unified control plane that sits between applications and AI models, giving centralized visibility, governance, and control over all AI traffic. ARC replaces raw provider API keys with rotatable virtual keys and supports connecting to providers via federated SSO pass-through. ARC lets customers set a monthly dollar budget per virtual key, with a choice of hard-block or continue-serving once exhausted. AI Firewall is a security module within ARC that protects AI-powered applications from prompt injection attacks with near-zero latency impact. AI Firewall uses Fastly's SmartParse detection engine and custom guardrails to detect attacks like prompt injection and other LLM specific attacks.^[12]

Fastly's cloud CDN accelerates the delivery of dynamic content and caches website content that is unpredictable and event-driven. Fastly's Compute platform helps customers compile custom code to WebAssembly and runs it at the Fastly edge. Deploying to a Compute service makes customer logic available across the Fastly network with a single deploy action. Fastly Object Storage is an Amazon S3-compatible large object storage solution. Fastly's Platform TLS product allows customers to programmatically manage certificates and keys for Transport Layer Security (TLS) using a web API. Origin Inspector provides a dataset and visualizations that offer real-time and historical visibility into responses delivered from origin servers to the Fastly Edge Cloud. Fastly says customers can configure the Fastly CDN service to cache and transmit protected health information (PHI) in keeping with Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) security requirements. Fastly describes Managed CDN as Fastly's managed cloud CDN deployed inside the customer's own network, and Professional Services as expert help to migrate or optimize a delivery service. Fastly describes itself as an ICANN-accredited domain registrar.^{[2][5][6][10][11][13][14][15][16][17]}