Fastly : Edge Cloud Platform Delivers and Secures ‘Link-in-Bio’ For Linktree’s 16 Million Social Platform Users Globally

SYDNEY - 22 SEPTEMBER, 2021 -- Fastly, Inc. (NYSE: FSLY), a global edge cloud platform provider, today announced that Melbourne-based linking platform, Linktree, has deployed Fastly's edge cloud platform and next-gen cloud-based web application firewall (Cloud WAF) to support its 16 million global users, making their online content easier to find, safer to manage, and likelier to convert on social media platforms and eCommerce stores.

Linktree decided to leverage Fastly's edge cloud platform to enable the organisation's developers by facilitating more team members to use the infrastructure simultaneously, saving time and streamlining the DevOps lifecycle. With a dedicated CI/CD pipeline for deploying changes to Fastly, access to the Fastly UI can now be restricted, and developers can make changes easily via pull request.

In addition, Linktree has worked with Fastly to improve its security posture and scale seamlessly at a time when the organisation faced a three-month sign-up spike during which millions of new users created an evergreen link to their online content.

Fastly's Cloud WAF deployment option offered a dev-friendly environment, including the accessibility to work at the edge and use Typescript code at the application layer.

"Although we had rules set up in our [previous] WAF, it was case by case rather than a holistic solution," says Paul Oram, Engineer Manager, Linktree. "We wanted it to cover the whole edge and integrate with our content delivery network. Indeed, there was a time when I was in the console all day every day, looking at attack surfaces and putting in rules to either block or rate limit them."

Early on in their engagement with Fastly, Linktree noticed a bad actor that had written a Python script to create multiple fake accounts daily. Leveraging Fastly's Cloud WAF, Linktree's team was able to create new rules within two minutes to block the bot. Fake accounts were shut down instantly.

Hot on the heels of the Fastly edge cloud platform and Cloud WAF deployment has been a performance boost. Uptime increased from 96 percent to 99.999 percent, putting the platform in a much better position to prepare for the unexpected.

"Selena Gomez might join the platform, then [Metallica], and that sets off a cascade of new users that you just can't predict. Having Fastly scale underneath us has been super beneficial," says Bradley Shawyer, Head of Engineering at Linktree.

During 2021, Linktree has seen steady growth with changing consumer behaviours, including more time spent on social media and online shopping. In the first three months of 2021, that growth spiked to add 4 million new users, with sign-ups peaking at around 43,000 per day.

Fastly has been a strategic upgrade for the Linktree developer and technical teams to meet evolving consumer and market conditions.

"It just works the way it should in a DevOps environment and is straightforward to empower infrastructure-as-code. Programmability and being able to work with Fastly in code has been powerful for Linktree. At the same time, Fastly has enabled Linktree to benefit beyond the engineering team - we supported the customer success team to lighten their load. The integrated product is working well for us. It's handled everything we need it to," says Oram.

Next on the team's agenda are ongoing security improvements, exploring Fastly's Image Optimizer, and moving Linktree's monolith application to serverless microservices architecture. For more details, please see the full case study, or contact [e-mail] for any questions.

Fastly helps people stay better connected with the things they love. Fastly's edge cloud platform enables customers to create great digital experiences quickly, securely, and reliably by processing, serving, and securing our customers' applications as close to their end-users as possible - at the edge of the internet. Fastly's platform is designed to take advantage of the modern internet, to be programmable, and to support agile software development with unmatched visibility and minimal latency, empowering developers to innovate with both performance and security. Fastly's customers include many of the world's most prominent companies, including Pinterest, The New York Times, and GitHub.