Fastly continues to deepen the Edge with acquisition of Glitch

Glitch, a company that provides a platform that allows developers to create, build and share complete web applications (also in edge environments), has been acquired by Fastly.

One of the main motivations behind the move was the successful collaboration experience the two brands shared in February 2022. At that time, Fastly integrated its Compute@Edge into the Glitch interface, allowing the platform’s community of 1.8 million developers to deploy their code in the Fastly compute environment.

Once Fastly dug deeper into the Glitch platform, it discovered a “powerful and flexible environment” that has made it “incredibly easy”for developers to work on full-stack web applications without having to worry about how to set up and administer a server, manage DNS, install a database or figure out the best way to deploy their code. “You can literally just press a button and your app is live, while Glitch takes care of the rest in the background,” says Lakshmi Sharma, chief product and strategy officer at Fastly.

At the same time, Glitch also provides inspiration through its “remixable” code, which makes development even easier. If a developer likes an application created by someone else, but needs to modify it to fit the specifications of their project or to make it their own, they can simply remix it and deploy it. This remix culture has allowed Glitch to create a collaborative community of developers who support each other in building apps, sites and tools, something that also attracts users from big companies like Google, Stripe, Twitter, Notion and Etsy.

Building a community on the edge

Having cemented Compute@Edge as an option for enterprise developers to build applications on Fastly’s edge network with all the performance, security and scale they need, the company wants to continue to expand its market share with small, medium and large enterprises. Fastly, through Sharma, has confirmed its commitment to “nurture the Glitch developer community”, which they consider “one of the most impressive and vibrant communities of creators on the Internet.”

On Glitch’s side, CEO Anil Dash stressed that the company is “incredibly excited” to join Fastly in order to bring the platform’s “potential” to many more developers: “We’re especially thrilled to think about the innovative new things people will build when we bring Fastly’s global edge network to every developer out there who’s got an idea for an app they just can’t wait to create.”