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Fastly Acquires Glitch - A big deal for the Serverless space?

Acquisition Fastly Glitch Serverless

Fastly has not made many public acquisitions. However their most recent acquisition is one that has potential to put a serious dent in the serverless market.

Glitch.com is a platform that enables anyone with programming experience to create cool apps. Their applications deploy instantly on cloud provider Digital Ocean. With their latest releases they have included full fledge frameworks as well as databases that all work out of the box. The code editor works from the browser as well. You could literally write your app on an iPad, without a keyboard, and a basic internet connection.

Apps created on Glitch all run containerized on the cloud. Fastly’s serverless platform runs JavaScript and VCL.

VCL (Varnish Configuration Language), a configuration-language-turned-programming-language, isn’t quite user-friendly. Fastly can win big if they offer more value on the JavaScript side of their Edge platform.

Glitch is a big fan of open source and code collaboration, their blog is full of examples of shared and modified projects continued by other enthusiasts. The same way Fastly has been very open about their technology stack which is based off the popular Varnish Cache software. Though they could share more of their custom mods (hint hint).

Glitch’s product fits very well in the Fastly suite. Fastly has a product suite full of products which can be interacted with instantly, something that overlaps with Glitch. I’m quite sure the Glitch users will be very happy with their product working and running even faster than before!

Fastly acquiring Glitch means that Fastly does not allow competition to expand or grow into this space. They will rather buy out competition than fight head to head. Glitch is just the start of what the serverless Products of the future look like. It will be a matter of time for the next generation of programmers and creators to build the future on serverless technology. This move means even more knowing that Digital Ocean has publicly released their Serverless / Functions suite the same month.

Congratulations to the Glitch and Fastly teams working on this, we certainly hope to see more news on the implementation and future of both products!