GIPHY handles tens of billions of requests daily with Fastly's edge cloud platform

The challenge

GIPHY's mission is to animate the world, enabling users to express themselves through its vast content on social media and messaging platforms. Vitor Pereira manages the content engineering and SRT teams within GIPHY's infrastructure organization, and he faces the daily challenge of serving tens of billions of requests with peaks reaching 400,000 requests per second. "We make use of the incredible content that we have to allow people to express themselves with some of the largest social media platforms in the world," Pereira explains. His teams are responsible for the entire infrastructure powering GIPHY's services, including content ingestion, moderation, storage, and delivery of hundreds of petabytes of data monthly.

The solution

GIPHY has partnered with Fastly for nearly a decade, which has been crucial for its operations. "There's no way GIPHY would be the popular platform that we are nowadays without Fastly," says Pereira. The company relies on Fastly's infrastructure to handle its massive traffic demands and to serve hundreds of petabytes of data monthly.

Fastly's VCL (Varnish Configuration Language) services provide GIPHY with the flexibility to optimize cache hit ratios and save compute resources. "The VCL services give us a lot of flexibility, so we were able to optimize our cache ratio and save those precious compute resources. The only true limitation that you have is your business requirements," Pereira notes. This flexibility also enables GIPHY to run business logic closer to customers, delivering superior performance.

GIPHY had barely implemented Fastly's services when they were put to the ultimate test — handling massive traffic spikes without any additional preparations. "We partnered with a customer that was going to hold a very large worldwide event," Pereira recalls. "We reached out to our account managers at Fastly and said, 'Look, we have this partner. They want to run a load test, and this is the amount of traffic they're going to send.' It was a gigantic amount of traffic. And Fastly just said, 'Yeah, that's fine. Just do it. We don't need to do any extra preparations.'" This level of confidence and resiliency has made GIPHY feel secure in their partnership with Fastly.

Securing a popular platform with Next-Gen WAF

As a popular platform, GIPHY attracts unwanted attention from bad actors. "Every company nowadays needs a proper and efficient WAF. And when you are a popular platform like GIPHY, you attract a lot of bad actors," notes Pereira. Fastly's Next-Gen WAF has proven to be an effective solution. "It's very efficient, it's easy to interact with, and it's what keeps us safe from bad actors."

Developer productivity with Fastly Compute & Object Storage

While VCL services form the backbone of GIPHY's infrastructure, Fastly Compute enables more complex operations beyond VCL's capabilities. "The Fastly VCL services are great, but VCL has its limitations, and it only takes you so far. Whenever you need to do something a little bit more complex, this is where we use Fastly Compute," explains Pereira.

To maximize developer productivity, GIPHY built a workflow that allows developers to focus solely on their code. "We wanted to make sure that the developers only need to be concerned about the code itself, so they wouldn't need to worry about provisioning a new pipeline, creating infrastructure, or setting up servers," says Pereira. By integrating with Fastly's custom GitHub action, they created a workflow that automatically tests and deploys to a safe, separated environment within two minutes, making the code available in a public-facing environment for immediate testing.

GIPHY also transitioned to Fastly Object Storage to manage its extensive content catalog. “We migrated pretty much all of our content to Fastly Object Storage. The interesting thing we saw was a huge cost reduction, but at the same time we also saw a performance increase because our content was right alongside Fastly’s own infrastructure,” Pereira reveals.

Real-time observability for instant insights

Fastly's Observability platform is a key tool for Pereira's team. "Fastly's Observability platform is my go-to platform whenever I need to have a quick look on a larger scale of how the services are behaving," he explains. The platform provides high-granularity metrics that enable quick health checks of GIPHY's services without adding latency.

While GIPHY uses integrations like Datadog for detailed analytics, Fastly's Observability platform offers the immediacy needed for rapid troubleshooting. "Fastly provides high granularity, high detail metrics for integrations like Datadog, and we use those on a daily basis. But sometimes you just need that quick check, a smoke test to see if everything is functioning fine. And Fastly's Observability is perfect for that," Pereira says.

Key takeaway

GIPHY's partnership with Fastly has enabled the company to handle massive traffic demands reliably while giving developers the tools they need to innovate. GIPHY relies on Fastly’s resilient platform to empower its millions of users to express themselves uniquely through its content. "We're inside some of the largest platforms out there, some of the largest social media and messaging apps," Pereira concludes. "Our presence in all sorts of social media and messaging apps allows people to express themselves in unique ways and just be more of themselves."