Best for — Serverless Platforms Medium

Who is Fastly Compute best for?

Quick fit guide: Who is Fastly Compute best for, who should avoid it, and what typically forces a switch.

Sources linked — see verification below.
Open decision brief → Alternatives
Who it fits Who should avoid Upgrade triggers

Freshness & verification

Last updated 2026-02-09 Intel generated 2026-02-06 1 source linked

Best use cases for Fastly Compute

  • Latency-sensitive request paths that benefit from edge execution
  • Programmable networking and edge middleware patterns
  • Global products where tail latency affects UX
  • Teams comfortable with edge constraints and architecture trade-offs

Who should avoid Fastly Compute?

  • You need deep cloud-native triggers and managed event ecosystems as the default
  • You want maximum portability and minimal platform-specific edge patterns
  • You need long-running or heavy compute per request

Upgrade triggers for Fastly Compute

  • You need more complex state patterns and operational ownership at the edge
  • Runtime constraints block required dependencies or workloads
  • You need clearer cost modeling for global traffic and networking

Sources & verification

Pricing and behavioral information comes from public documentation and structured research. When information is incomplete or volatile, we prefer to say so rather than guess.

  1. https://developer.fastly.com/learning/compute/ ↗