Sulu joins the Fastly Fast Forward program

If you haven't encountered Fastly before: they operate a leading edge cloud platform, built to be faster and more programmable than traditional CDN infrastructure. Rather than running many points of presence, Fastly uses fewer but significantly more powerful nodes, designed to cache more and deliver content faster.

In practice, this means your content is served from servers physically closer to your visitors — whether they're in Vienna, São Paulo, or Singapore — rather than making a round-trip to a single origin server somewhere in a data center. Fastly's network carries over 1.8 trillion requests daily across 497 Tbps of edge capacity. Beyond delivery, the platform includes edge computing, real-time observability, and a next-generation Web Application Firewall.

Fast Forward already supports organisations like the Rust Software Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Python Software Foundation — projects where infrastructure reliability directly affects millions of developers worldwide.

For agencies and teams building on Sulu, the practical impact breaks down simply: pages load faster, traffic spikes don't take down sites, and editors see their published content go live immediately — not after waiting for caches to expire.

This matters at every project scale. A faster site means better conversion rates, better search rankings, and a better experience for visitors regardless of where they are in the world. And because Fastly handles the heavy lifting at the edge, development teams spend less time on infrastructure firefighting and more time building.

Sulu's architecture has always been designed to work well with caching layers and reverse proxies. Fastly extends this to a global edge network — content is cached and served from locations close to the end user, cutting round-trip times significantly. Combined with Sulu's flexible content model and API-driven architecture, this creates a setup where performance scales with traffic demand rather than against it.

That's the foundation. The more interesting part is what happens when content actually changes.

Aggressive caching and fresh content are genuinely in tension. Push TTLs too high and editors see stale pages after publishing. Drop them too low and the performance benefit disappears.

Sulu handles this at the CMS layer through precise cache invalidation — when content changes, only the affected resources are marked for refresh, leaving the rest of the cache intact. Fastly complements this with Instant Purge, which invalidates stale content in 150ms on a global average — meaning an editor publishes a change and it is live worldwide within a fraction of a second, not minutes later.

The result: teams get full CDN performance without building workarounds for editorial workflows. Editors don not need to understand caching. They just publish, and it works.

For enterprise deployments, Fastly's Web Application Firewall adds a meaningful security layer without affecting response times. SQL injection, XSS, Layer 7 attacks, and malicious bot traffic are blocked at the edge before they ever reach the application. Around 90% of Fastly customers run their Next-Gen WAF in blocking mode — a strong signal of how much confidence the market places in it.