https://storage.googleapis.com/eps/Google.Cloud.Platform.Podcast.Episode.228.mp3

Tyler thank you so much for joining us. Super-excited to have you here. As we get things started, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you do?

TYLER: Sure. Hi. I'm Tyler I'm the CTO and co-founder of Fastly these days. I've done all sorts of jobs with Fastly.

The job of CTO completely changes, basically, it seems like from week to week-- especially in the early stages of a startup. But we've been around for, like, nine years now. And so nowadays, I actually run a small applied research team that sits besides engineering at Fastly.

The way that I like to describe it is, we have work on things that are highly likely to fail. But if they don't, it could be pretty cool. So we have a few of those projects that have turned out to be pretty interesting these days.

MARK: I want to hear more about that. And as a startup grows, it just does go all over the place-- the responsibilities of every person, usually wearing multiple hats. It's a very complex process. But I think the first question, really, is what is Fastly?

TYLER: That's fair. So Fastly is an edge cloud platform. And if that doesn't make sense, that's understandable. It's a relatively new thing that's come out in the market.

We are a cloud of sorts. However, we are focused on the very edge of the network. So we're focused on types of logic and things that you can do at the edge of the network, as close to your customers as possible. So we focus a lot on latency reduction, on resiliency of services and things like that.

And so in the early days, what this meant was, like, we're like a smarter CDN kind of thing. And these days, what it means is, well, it's more like an edge base serverless system. And we'll see where we go from there.

BRIAN: I'd like to dig a little deeper on why do people want the things that you're making? What problems does it help them solve?

TYLER: One of the biggest problems that people tend to face, especially as your site gets lighter, there's a couple of them. One is scale. Like, how do we handle the large amounts of traffic at a high scale website, or app or API or anything-- really, anything that goes over the internet at this point. And so that's the big part of what we do.

So caching is a big part of that. But it's also just about spreading out the places that your customers are trying to connect to to make it as close to them as possible. Probably the key thing there, though, is actually latency reduction. And so that's been in our blood since the very beginning. Like, this is what CDNs were always for. It's about resiliency and latency reduction.

And as we moved on to being an edge provider, it's really still about that same thing. But it's a totally different way of approaching the problem. But at the end of the day, really what we're trying to do is make it faster for your customers to access your information, and interact with your site and your app and everything else with as low downtime is humanly possible.

MARK: Let's talk about that. And so for people who aren't familiar, a CDN stands for a content delivery network. And if I'm going to give the most simple explanation of a CDN that I can, they're typically re-hosting assets in more locations across the globe.

And the biggest reasons they do that is one you already mentioned-- latency. So it's closer to your users. And two, because they can do more advanced caching and they have technology built around that to help speed things up. First of all, is that an OK definition for a CDN?

TYLER: Yeah, it's a pretty reasonable definition. But my actual favorite way to describe this is actually a metaphor about, like, a library system. It's not a perfect metaphor, but the idea is basically this, where you have a central library typically in a city.

It's the larger one. It has most of the books. And you have all the satellite ones.

Well, if you want to get a particular book, usually, in one of these library systems, you can actually go to your local library. And if they have the book, great. You have the book now. If they don't have the book, they can actually get the book from the central library as well. It'll take a little bit longer.

But once the book gets there, now it's there for you. And the next person in your neighborhood who comes along to get it, oh, it's already there. Great. And likewise, you have one book that's particularly popular, well, maybe you get more books and you start sending them out to all the different libraries.