Fastly PoC Demo – Andrew Muller

This is a proof of concept to demonstrate core Fastly behaviours including caching, response headers, and origin failover. It uses a primary EC2 origin backed by Nginx, with a secondary S3 origin configured as a failover.

Live Response Headers

The headers below are fetched live from this request. They show Fastly edge behaviour such as cache status, TTL, and custom headers.

Loading headers...

What’s Configured

• Edge caching: The origin sets Surrogate-Control: max-age=60. Fastly respects this, and x-cache and Age headers reflect TTL behaviour.
• 404 handling: 404 responses are not cached. Each request to a missing page results in a MISS and Age: 0.
• Custom headers: The origin includes hometest: fastly, which is passed through by Fastly to the client.
• Origin failover: If the EC2 origin becomes unhealthy (based on a health check), Fastly automatically switches to an S3 backup origin. This ensures continued availability during outages.

How to Verify Behaviour

# Check caching and confirm Fastly is active
curl -I https://fastly.andrewmuller.com.au/
Expect Fastly headers like: x-cache, age, via

# Confirm 404s are not cached
curl -I https://fastly.andrewmuller.com.au/404
Expect: x-cache: MISS and age: 0

# Trigger failover to S3
1. SSH into the EC2 origin
2. sudo systemctl stop nginx
3. Wait for the health check to fail and VCL logic to switch to the secondary origin
4. curl -I https://fastly.andrewmuller.com.au/
5. Confirm the response Server: AmazonS3

andrew@andrewmuller.com.au