Fastly review

Fastly has doubled down on its reputation as the performance leader with its **Compute (WASM)** platform. By utilizing WebAssembly for per-request isolation, Fastly has achieved microsecond-level instance instantiation - effectively eliminating the 'Cold Start' problem that still plagues AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions. With the 2025 addition of C++ and Go support, the platform is now the default for high-frequency edge logic, such as real-time video manipulation and dynamic ad insertion.

The defining strategic update is the **AI Bot Management** suite. As LLM scrapers now account for over 50% of global bot traffic, protecting intellectual property has become a technical priority. Fastly's new system allows for granular classification of bots, letting you differentiate between helpful search crawlers and aggressive AI scrapers. This allows brands to 'Challenge' AI bots with Proof-of-Work tasks, making data scraping financially unviable for unauthorized model training.

While Cloudflare wins on the 'All-in-one' ease of use, Fastly remains the choice for the 'Performance Purist.' The ability to perform **Instant Purging** - invalidating global cache in under 150ms - is still the gold standard for e-commerce and news sites where data changes by the second. It is a more complex tool with a $50 minimum entry point, but for applications where every millisecond translates to conversion revenue, Fastly is the only serious choice.