Fastly's Compute@Edge

Fastly is a cloud computing provider and content delivery network (CDN).

Earlier this year they released their Compute@Edge platform. This platform allows to run WebAssembly code at the Fastly edge. They chose WebAssembly for exactly the reasons we listed in the previous chapter: lightweight sandboxing, per-request isolation and performance.

They released a Rust SDK (fastly), which provides the necessary integration to read an incoming request and generate an appropriate response. The host runtime uses WASI to provide the necessary system interfaces. This means that you can write normal Rust code, using most of the Rust standard library and a large number of available Rust crates without issues. They also support JavaScript and Go as languages on this platform.

You can find the Fastly Compute@Edge documentation at https://docs.fastly.com/products/compute-at-edge.

You will learn how to write a small application for this platform in the Edge computing tutorial later in this book.