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Fastly

Fastly provides the following services to optimize and secure content delivery operations for your Magento Commerce Cloud projects. These services are included with your Magento Commerce Cloud subscription at no additional cost.

  • Content delivery network (CDN)—Varnish-based service that caches your site pages, assets, CSS, and more in backend data centers you set up. As customers access your site and stores, the requests hit Fastly to load cached pages faster. The CDN service provides the following features:

  • Security—After you set up your Magento Commerce Cloud project to use the Fastly CDN, additional security features are available to protect your sites and network.

    • DDoS protection—Built-in protection against common attacks like Ping of Death, Smurf attacks, as well as other ICMP-based floods.

    • Managed Cloud WAF—Managed web application firewall service that provides PCI-compliant protection to block malicious traffic before it can damage your production Magento Commerce Cloud sites and network.

  • Image optimization—Offloads image processing and resizing load to the Fastly service freeing servers to process orders and conversions efficiently. See Fastly image optimization.

We highly recommend using Fastly for your CDN, security, and image optimization needs, unless you are using Magento Commerce in a headless deployment.

Fastly CDN module for Magento 2

Fastly services for Magento Commerce Cloud use the Fastly CDN module for Magento 2 installed in the following environments: Pro Staging and Production, Starter Production (master) and Staging.

On initial provisioning or upgrade of your Magento Commerce Cloud project, we install the latest version of the Fastly CDN module. When Fastly releases module updates, you receive notifications in the Magento Admin UI for your environments. We recommend that you update your environments to use the latest release. See Upgrade Fastly.

DDoS protection

DDOS protection is built-in to the Fastly CDN service. After you enable and configure the Fastly service for your Magento Commerce Cloud sites, Fastly filters all web and admin traffic to your site to detect and block potential attacks:

  • For attacks targeting layer 3 or 4, the Fastly service filters out traffic based on port and protocol, inspecting only HTTP or HTTPS requests. ICMP, UDP, and other network born attacks are dropped at our network edge. This includes reflection and amplification attacks, which use UDP services like SSDP or NTP. By providing this level of protection, we effectively block multiple common attacks like Ping of Death, Smurf attacks, as well as other ICMP-based floods. Fastly manages the TCP level attacks at the cache layer, addressing the necessary scale and context per client to deal with SYN flood and its many variants, including TCP stack, resource attacks, and TLS attacks within the Fastly systems.

  • The Fastly service protects against Layer 7 attacks by applying custom rules (using VCLs) that can inspect for and filter out malicious requests based on header, payload, or the combination of attributes that identify attack traffic.

Fastly and 503 timeouts

Fastly has a default 60 second time out. For Fastly module 1.2.22 and later, the timeout for the Magento Admin is three minutes.

Any request processing that exceeds the timeout period, returns a 503 error. As a result, you might get 503 errors when attempting operations that require lengthy processing, or when trying to perform bulk operations.

If you receive a 503 error, try to submit the request directly to the origin shield URL and review logs to identify the source of the issue. For details, see Fastly troubleshooting.

Fastly can be bypassed for the Magento Admin to perform long running or bulk actions and API access to avoid 503s. For Fastly module 1.2.22 and later, the timeout for the Magento Admin was extended to three minutes. You can also update the Fastly configuration for your store to extend the Fastly timeout for the Magento Admin.

Backends and Origin shields

Backend settings provide fine tuning for Fastly performance with Origin shielding and timeouts. A backend is a specific location (IP or domain) with configured Origin shield and timeout settings for checking and providing cached content.

Origin shielding routes all requests for your store to a specific Point of Presence (POP). When a request is received, the POP checks for cached content and provides it. If it is not cached, it continues to the Shield POP, then to the Origin server which caches the content. The shields reduces traffic directly to the origin.

We provide detailed instructions for configuring backends when you configure Fastly.

Basic authentication

Basic authentication is a feature to protect every page and asset on your site with a username and password. We do not recommend activating basic authentication on your Production environment. You can configure it on Staging to protect your site when completing development.

If you add user access and enable basic authentication on Staging, you can still access the Magento Admin without requiring additional credentials to enter.

Custom VCLs and actions

Fastly provides an extremely custom code friendly method for creating lists of items like IPs and domains to complete actions via Fastly and Varnish code blocks. For example, you can allow, block, or redirect access for specific users or IPs using edge and ACL dictionaries and VCL code.

After you have set up Fastly, you can create custom VCL snippets using these edge dictionaries and ACLs.

Force TLS

Fastly supports forcing unencrypted requests to TLS through the Force TLS feature. Set up a secure base URL in Magento and turn on the Force TLS option in the Fastly CDN module. For details and instructions, see the Fastly Force TLS guide.

GeoIP service support

Fastly provides a GeoIP service and supports some GeoIP functionality. GeoIP handling manages visitor redirection (automatically) and store matching (select from list) based on their obtained country code. For more information, see the Fastly GeoIP documentation.

Installation and configuration

The installation and configuration process is:

  • Install the Fastly module in an Integration branch, without configuring settings or entering credentials.
  • Deploy the code to integration then to Staging and Production
  • Configure Fastly in Staging and Production, not in Integration or your local
  • Test Fastly for caching

For instructions, see Set up Fastly. After you have configured it, you can continue with advanced options including custom VCL snippets.

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