Case Study: Ruby Central achieves reliable, scalable gem delivery with Fastly

Ruby Central Powering the Ruby ecosystem with Fastly

Ruby Central, the nonprofit behind RubyGems and the Ruby community’s key conferences, needed a way to reliably handle massive gem download traffic at scale. With about 3 billion gem downloads per month and traffic from roughly 10 million unique IP addresses, Ruby Central turned to Fastly and its CDN to keep performance high and availability steady.

Fastly’s CDN and Fast Forward program offloaded traffic from Ruby Central’s infrastructure, making gem delivery fast and low-maintenance. The results included zero downtime and no full outages since 2013; in March 2025 alone, Fastly served 51.28 billion requests and 5.66 petabytes of data for RubyGems.org with a 98.94% hit ratio, helping Ruby Central save resources and focus on core development.

Ruby Central

Marty Haught

Director of Open Source