Fastly acquires Fanout for real-time edge app development

Fastly has announced its acquisition of Fanout as part of its growth strategy to identify and utilise technologies and talent that increase performance, security and innovation for customers.

The edge cloud network provider says Fanout's platform simplifies building and scaling real-time and streaming APIs such as live chat support, eCommerce, video streaming, gaming, and collaborative editing.

Noting the importance of a digital experience's speed and performance for customer engagement and conversion, Fastly says integrating Fanout's technology will 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," IDC research vice president Ghassan Abdo says.

"To add this functionality into the same stack where applications are already being built should help resource-constrained developers at SMBs and enterprises alike."

What Fanout brings to the Fastly platform:

• Delivers 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 wasting time worrying about the intricacies of real-time protocols.
   
• Fastly also intends to integrate the Fanout Prox into its Compute@Edge serverless offering, which it says will allow developers to build fully interactive real-time applications securely and at scale within Fastly's 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," Fastly CEO Joshua Bixby says.

"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."

Fastly offers people and organisations more control, faster content, and more dynamic applications.

Through the combination of its edge cloud network and powerful software, Fastly helps customers develop, deliver, and secure modern distributed applications and digital experiences.

Furthermore, Fastly's international customers include Pinterest, The New York Times, and GitHub, with ANZ customers such as Freelancer, Kogan, Linktree, Nine, NRL, Radio New Zealand, Seven Network, Trademe and Vodafone.