Fastly Instant Purge: Under 150ms for Over a Decade

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2024-10-08 19:30:03

Cloudflare recently announced their ability to provide “instant purge” in under 150ms. This is good news for everyone and we’d like to formally welcome them to the club! Now that we’re not the only vendor capable of instantly purging, the internet is better, and as a result, more users are happier.

This announcement brings back fond memories from thirteen years ago when we were first building our purging platform. Our customers have now been enjoying our Instant Purge™ capabilities for over a decade (and not much in engineering accomplishments can be measured in decades).

Since 2011, Fastly has been able to purge content globally in 150ms*, allowing our customers to re-imagine their content publishing workflows. Customers no longer had a delay between their decision to remove content from their global cache footprint and the actual purge.

The traditional view in the industry used to be that you purge when something went wrong, for example, publishing incorrect information. Our belief from day one was that purging is something you should be able to do as part of normal business. It's not just there to recover from errors, it should be part of the modern app development process and strategy for caching and serving content. With instant purging, you can cache what was previously seen as uncachable – frequently changing dynamic content like sports scores, inventory, stock tickers, API requests, personalized content, and more. As more people expect purging to be done in an instant (and more people should want this!) the better the internet will get for end-users everywhere.