Fastly Partners with Microsoft to Power Data Analytics at the Edge with Microsoft Azure Data Explorer


Already supporting leading brands like Taboola, Fastly’s superior edge cloud technology and Microsoft’s powerful Azure platform create a scalable, near-real-time big data solution

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 29, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Fastly, the leading edge cloud platform, today announced a partnership with Microsoft Azure. The strategic partnership integrates Fastly’s superior edge cloud platform with Microsoft’s Azure services, including Azure Data Explorer, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure Event Grid, to create a powerful, near-real-time data analytics solution. Already being used by global businesses like Taboola, the partnership empowers companies to improve accuracy and speed of business decision-making, leveraging big data to optimize product performance and deliver exceptional end-user experiences.

Currently, 2.5 billion gigabytes of data are captured daily, and with the continued rollout of more internet-connected devices, this number is only growing. To maintain a competitive advantage in a digital-first world, businesses need tools to organize, analyze, and act on insights gleaned from this vast amount of data. To provide visibility into these large data sets, Microsoft launched Azure Data Explorer, big data interactive analytics service.

The partnership between Fastly and Microsoft Azure takes these capabilities a step further to enable businesses to collect data in real-time from the edge, and pair that with other insights from their analytics and business intelligence tools in a central, integrated platform. Top brands can now instantly identify trends and patterns at scale to make immediate, impactful business decisions informed by big data. Unlike traditional edge solutions, Fastly provides 100 percent of logs in real-time from the network edge, allowing businesses to monitor site performance and troubleshoot issues as they happen. In partnering with Microsoft, Fastly integrates its real-time data logging capabilities for automatic ingestion and analysis of application and engagement performance.

The integrated solution is already producing results for market-leading companies including Taboola, the largest platform for content recommendation, audience acquisition, and native advertising. Taboola generates 22 billion records of edge delivery data logs per day and needed a way to quickly, simply, and cost-effectively analyze its data for optimal service performance and content recommendations. Utilizing Fastly’s edge cloud to stream content access logs in real-time directly into Azure Blob Storage and then ingest that data into Azure Data Explorer automatically, Taboola estimates significant savings of developer hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars, compared to its previous solution.

“Azure Data Explorer, together with Fastly’s real-time logging, outperforms our previous solution with a faster update time and an intuitive interactive interface. Plus, it was so simple that we were up and running in a week, ingesting and analyzing 17 TB of data per day,” remarked Ariel Pisetzky, VP Information Technology at Taboola. “Our team was even able to instantly identify a problematic latency issue impacting the speed at which content was being served to customers and rectify the issue in real-time. In a time where speed of reaction and innovation is paramount to user experience, this capacity is indispensable.”

“With Azure Data Explorer, engineers can instantly identify trends, patterns, or anomalies from their ever-growing and changing data. Joining forces with Fastly, we can provide innovative organizations with a solution to deeply understand across their edge workloads,” says Daniel Yu, Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft. “Microsoft and Fastly share the same principles of speed, scalability, and flexibility, so we believe the integration of our technologies will provide a unique solution for our customers.”

“Fastly delivers more than a three million log events per second, empowering our customers to easily view their traffic, understand their site health, and make the changes they need as quickly as possible,” explained Dana Wolf, SVP of Product and Marketing at Fastly. “To this end, we embrace and integrate with a multitude of central cloud platforms. This partnership and the integrations we’re building with Microsoft are another investment in support of our customer-first philosophy, empowering businesses to get the most value out of their operations at the edge.”

Fastly is trusted by brands like Airbnb, The New York Times, Pinterest, GitHub, and thousands more across e-commerce, travel, and hospitality, digital publishing, SaaS industries, and financial services.

To learn more about Fastly’s edge cloud services, visit: fastly.com/products/edge-compute

To learn more about this solution and the benefits realized, visit Taboola’s blog and Microsoft’s blog.

About Fastly
Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust Fastly’s edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand. Founded in 2011, Fastly powers online destinations including Airbnb, GitHub, Alaska Airlines, Pinterest, Vimeo, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Learn more at Fastly.com and follow us on Twitter @fastly.

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