Fastly Enhancements

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Many Hosting Options

Netlify

• One of the most popular
• Great developer experience
• Easy to use

but

• Rate limiting
• Inconsistent deploy times   

Fastly

• Not as user friendly
• Requires more specific technical knowledge (varnish/vcl)

but

• We don't need to upload files to Fastly
• We can point them to our files in GCS

Fastly

Because we have more control over how files are deployed to the CDN with Fastly we believe we can have a significantly faster experience when deploying.

What if we could automate any of the issues that user might have when dealing with Fastly?

First enhancement: redirects

Two pieces were needed:

1. gatsby-plugin-cloud

2. Enhancing the Gatsby Cloud Deployer

Fastly Enhancements

gatsby-plugin-cloud

Taking inspiration from gatsby-plugin-netlify, during `gatsby build`, the gatsby-cloud-plugin generates a _redirects.json file that includes all the redirects found in the code.

Gatsby Cloud Deployer

Gatsby Cloud Deployer looks for this `_redirects.json` file and then generates the proper vcl files to handle those redirects.

gatsby.com

We have gatsbyjs.com building on Fastly and you can see consistent deploy times of between 6 and 7 minutes.

We haven't spent any time optimizing it so this is our baseline. 

Demo

What's Next?

Generate VCL code for Headers

Again using Netlify as inspiration, we can generate a _headers.json file using the plugin.

Then generate a vcl file in Fastly to handle all the headers.

What's Next Next?

• Enhance gatsby-plugin-cloud
  • Pick up env variables during the cloud runner
  • Add more configuration options for Gatsby Cloud deployers. Handle more than just Netlify
  • Allow for a customer generated custom.vcl file to be uploaded to Fastly
• Enhance deployer to generate more complex vcl files
  • Maybe we could not upload files to specific GCS bucket for a site but use the hashed files generated during a cloud runner build
• Automatically partition fastly sites for users

Questions?