Fastly: Pushing content closer to users

The vision: To be small on the inside and big on the outside

Superology decided to use Fastly’s CDN Edge Cloud platform to speed up mobile applications by pushing content closer to its users, hence providing an upgraded user experience. Fastly’s global content delivery capabilities include caching services to accelerate the delivery of content and protect their origin servers, making the whole process faster, safer and smoother.

The move to Fastly was driven by a need for high-performance and streamlined workflows, initially for the mobile betting app. Our engineers wanted to simplify computing every user request (requests can peak at 15,000 per second). Fastly’s cache purging from the inside helps manage the large volume of content requests coming in.

The nature of live sports means that users have zero tolerance for time lags and blackouts. Fastly’s CDN provisioning at 130 Tbps with POPs strategically located and connected around the globe provides the needed performance and scalability. The origin load is kept at a minimum thanks to features such as request collapsing and origin shielding. Also, the ability to invalidate content in less than 150 milliseconds means that Superology can provide accurate information without delays.

Real-time metrics and speedy analysis

Real-time logs and statistics via the API provide Superology with the level of observability required to monitor all services and act instantly in case of trouble. In particular, new features require speedy analysis. And Fastly’s real-time log streaming integration to Amazon’s S3 helps the engineering team monitor and track all the APIs and run fast analytics on large amounts of data. The team found it easy to integrate S3 logs with an in-house analytics solution backed up by Clickhouse.

Delivered at the edge: World’s first sports fan social app for the betting industry

Authentication on the edge

Thanks to programmable VCL, Superology can authenticate users on the edge by verifying JWT tokens, so any request with an invalid or expired token will never reach origin servers. That helps the engineering team not to worry about potential high traffic of malicious users.

Caching streaming content

Fastly’s streaming miss technology enables Superology to cache streaming content. Chats and live match trackers are delivered by server-sent events (SSE), ensuring that only one request per resource reaches the origin servers, regardless of thousands of users watching.

Microservices and Fastly

Superology’s microservices architecture helps deal with cache invalidation. When the content changes, for example, a user changes a profile picture or comments in a chat, the corresponding microservice issues a command to purge the Fastly cache, which immediately updates the whole stack. By collecting the purge requests from all applications and having APIs per project, Superology gained the flexibility to do a fast lane purge from one place or spread the purges.

Developers empowered by a self-service approach

Easy integration and support

Prior Varnish knowledge made integration easy for Superology. The familiar terminology and Fastly’s articles written for developers rather than salespeople also enabled a painless migration. When new features are developed, the DevOps team transforms them into Terraform script, so delivering changes is reproducible and transparent across all environments.

Driving change

Superbet acquired Superology to lead the digital transformation of its products and build a culture of innovation on the group level. With the help of Fastly, Superology brings betting apps into line with the most popular social media apps and helps grow a thriving community within the industry.