4.8.19
Fastly, the leading edge cloud platform, today announced it will connect its edge network with Microsoft Azure. In keeping with Fastly’s commitment to transparency and prioritizing the customer, the two companies will offer a predictable and cost-effective connection between Fastly’s edge cloud and Azure services.
As businesses grow to serve complex user experiences, cooperation between network providers is vital. Just as consumers expect on-demand streams and rush delivery of goods, so do businesses demand pain-free portability of application stacks and services optimized for their needs between multiple providers.
Companies such as Wowza, a live streaming technology company, are actively adopting a multi-provider approach. “Wowza products and services use a variety of providers to offer better streaming experiences to our customers all over the world. Performance and efficiency are huge factors for the scale and economics we need,” said Barry Owen, vice president of engineering at Wowza. “Fastly’s high-performance edge cloud paired with Microsoft Azure delivers the scale and economics we’re looking for.”
The integration with Azure works via multiple dedicated, high-speed Azure ExpressRoute connections between Fastly’s edge cloud network and Azure. This gives mutual customers optimized traffic flows and predictable, cost-effective economics. These economics are particularly beneficial to media and entertainment organizations that deliver massive amounts of content in the form of subscription entertainment and video and audio streaming each month.
“At Fastly, we’re consistently seeing our customers and the market embrace strategies that leverage multiple providers. Integrations such as the one between Fastly’s edge cloud network and Microsoft Azure make it easier for our customers to do so,” explained Artur Bergman, founder and CEO of Fastly. “Our partners at Microsoft are aligned on this, and by directly connecting Fastly and Microsoft’s networks, we empower businesses to innovate more at the edge, instead of focusing on traffic costs.”
A few benefits of this collaboration between Fastly and Microsoft’s clouds include:
* COST-EFFECTIVE, INCREASED PERFORMANCE: The direct connection to Azure via ExpressRoute delivers speedy performance and predictable, cost-effective economics to mutual customers.
* STREAMLINED MIGRATION TO AZURE: Integrating connectivity simplifies migration to multi-cloud and hybrid deployments.
* REAL-TIME MONITORING: Fastly provides a real-time log stream, allowing businesses to send rich, granular traffic and usage data to Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Explorer. This log stream enables customers to proactively address operational issues before they impact end users and affect customer reputations.
* REDUCED INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDS: Fastly caches more at the edge for longer durations of time while collapsing duplicate requests back to Azure origins, reducing technical complexity.
“Fastly’s edge cloud has become part of the innovation toolkit for many development teams,” said Tad Brockway, corporate vice president, Azure Storage, Media and Edge, Microsoft Corp. “We’re excited to collaborate with Fastly to bring its edge and Microsoft Azure to even more customers than before.”
The news comes on the heels of Fastly and Microsoft’s recent collaboration integrating Fastly’s edge cloud platform with Azure Data Explorer, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure Event Grid, to create a powerful, near-real-time data analytics solution for global businesses.
