Webcast: Fastly takes drupal.org to extremes

Fastly takes Drupal.org to extremesFaster, more secure, costs under control

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Drupal.org and Fastly

It started with a "Hey, you should talk with Ed"

fastly.com/open-source

The story so far...

Topics for today's webcastVarnish config / VCL

TLS/SSL security benefits

Logs/data streams

Purge speed

Origin shield

Load balancers no more

Latency Improvements

What's next...

Varnish config / VCL

● We were already running and loved Varnish before adding Fastly.

● We were able to quickly deploy our existing VCL configuration to Fastly.

● With Fastly we can quickly push and revert VCL changes.

TLS/SSL security benefits

Supporting HTTPS and HSTS

● Fastly caches and prevents most of the Drupal.org requests from reaching our Origin servers.

● We know Fastly can handle our raw traffic; one less scaling issue to be concerned with.

Logs/data streams

Every Drupal site in the world can call "home" to Drupal.org to check for updates. We use this data to calculate usage statistics.

Fastly sends logs directly to our rsyslog endpoint in real time.

We get a lot of requests for updates

Purging

150 milliseconds to purge means we can publish new releases in an instant.

Soft purge means we can serve stale objects from Fastly caches while background fetching the newest content from origin.

Request Collapsing

When objects are not in cache, request collapsing in combination with Origin Shield avoids the “Stampeding Herd” and results in a single request to origin from the CDN for a single object.

Origin shieldFirst request

Subsequent requests

What does it mean?

Combining Origin Shield and Soft Purges:

March

62015

March

62016

5,714,472 requests to origin (old CDN)

59,751 requests to origin (Fastly)

1% of the requests with new config means huge savings compared to our previous CDN

Fastly replaced our load balancers

Since Feb. 25th, Drupal.org no longer has load balancers - Fastly performs health checks and routes directly to our web servers.

Lower TCO; less complexity and improved latency.

Latency improvements

Fastly is connected to NERO, NERO is connected to OSL, OSL is connected to Drupal.org.

…everybody wins.

Fastly peering with NERO

● Tag responses with keys● Purge all cached objects associated with a key

in one command

Surrogate Keys

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Surrogate-Key: tmpl3 artcl938

Content-Type: text/html

Content-Length: 28407

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Surrogate-Key: tmpl5 artcl938

Content-Type: text/html

Content-Length: 21034

Surrogate Keys

But what about Drupal?

● Basic caching support● Fastly plugin available

● Drupal7’s caching support is very basic● Fastly plugin works, but is even more basic

Drupal 7

Drupal 8

Cache tags

X-Drupal-Cache-Tags: node_view node_view_article node:5 user:1 filter_format:basic_html taxonomy_term:1 taxonomy_term:2 taxonomy_term_view menu:tools menu:footer menu:main menu:account

● Cache tags are surrogate keys● Fastly does have a size limit● Hash the keys & truncate to 3 characters● Purge both variations

Cache tags

Drupal 8

● Very good caching support● Fastly plugin synergizes incredibly well

● Supporting Cache Contexts○ Accept-Language○ Geo-targeting○ Phase of the moon

The future

https://www.fastly.com/

http://buytaert.net/making-drupal-8-fly

http://wimleers.com/talk/caching-at-the-edge-cdns-for-everyone

https://www.drupal.org/project/fastly

Links

Kvestions?