Fastly acquires Fanout to unlock real-time app development at the edge

Fastly has acquired Fanout, a platform that makes it easy to build and scale real-time and streaming APIs such as live chat support, ecommerce, video streaming, gaming, collaborative editing and more. The acquisition is part of Fastly’s broader growth strategy to identify and deploy technologies and talent that increase performance, security and innovation for customers.

The integration of Fanout technology into Fastly’s network is designed to help enable real-time app development at the edge with improved time-to-market, reduced friction and unprecedented scale.

“With the addition of the Fanout technology into Fastly’s portfolio, it positions Fastly well to support customers that want to migrate away from existing, complicated in-house WebSocket stacks, as well as customers who don’t have engineering resources to build a push architecture for real-time data and communications to any device, anywhere,” said IDC research vice president Ghassan Abdo. “To add this functionality into the same stack where applications are already being built should help resource-constrained developers.”

Fanout’s value to the Fastly platform is its ability to deliver real-time development that is transport agnostic and streamline workflows efficiently, freeing developers to build the best possible experience for their users without having to waste time worrying about the intricacies of real-time protocols.

Fastly plans to integrate the Fanout proxy into its Compute@Edge serverless offering, enabling developers to build fully interactive real-time applications securely and at-scale within Fastly’s edge network.

“We’ve always been driven to create the tools our customers need for building and delivering exceptional digital experiences behind the best of the web,” said Joshua Bixby, CEO of Fastly. “Integrating Fanout’s real-time application technology into ours gives developers a consistent development experience, empowering them to effortlessly upgrade their end-user experiences in a fraction of the time and with fewer resources. The integration will also allow customers to leverage Fastly’s global scale to support the needs of the largest enterprises.”