Case Study: Die Zeit delivers news in milliseconds and dynamic paywalls with Fastly

Die Zeit delivers news 100x faster with Fastly

Die Zeit, a leading German news publisher, faced performance challenges with its complex digital platform. Their legacy infrastructure struggled with traffic spikes and their Varnish VCL code had become overly complex, making it difficult to manage sophisticated business logic like subscription paywalls. They needed a modern edge platform from a vendor like Fastly to handle orchestration without compromising speed.

Fastly implemented its CDN and Compute@Edge solutions, using Rust as the development language. This allowed Die Zeit to orchestrate dynamic paywalls at the edge, achieving a >90% cache hit ratio to protect their backend. News delivery times were shortened from seconds to milliseconds using Fastly's Instant Purge. The result was a 100x acceleration in content delivery and a streamlined developer experience for maintaining complex platform logic.

Die Zeit