Development Acceleration

What’s holding back web builder velocity?

Over the last 10 years, the large cloud providers have created thousands of point services — cloud primitives — such as compute and storage. These services have become the hammers and nails that teams have had to assemble and maintain in order to build web applications.

Unfortunately, in too many cases the effort has grown out of control. Organizations have gathered entire teams of scarce, expensive talent. And too often, the bulk of their resources are now spent simply keeping the application operating at scale. Many teams are bogged down with non-functional requirements or NFRs such as interoperability, reliability, scalability and the other ‘itys’. Many spend more time on NFRs than on improving the app itself.

Worse, the work is not easy and requires experts who are hard to recruit and retain. Some CTOs have complained that they train these experts only to have cloud vendors poach them.

Today, over 20 ‘cloud primitives’ are typically required to deploy a modern web app. Many enterprises use at least three vendors across cloud infrastructure, CDN, security, observability, and continuous integration / continuous deployment.

Turbocharge developer velocity

The good news is, there’s a better way. Teams using Layer0 can now harness the power of those 20+ cloud primitives, and stop wasting valuable time and resources on the plumbing. They can focus on building a better application. And they can release up to twice as fast with higher confidence.

It’s all thanks to a builder-friendly Layer0 platform that includes all the capabilities and abstracts away the complexity. And it runs on one of the world’s largest and highest-performance proprietary global networks.

Those core capabilities span the workflow of your teams in a way that no bag of 20 tools ever could, giving your teams incredible superpowers that Layer0 customers say they didn’t know they could have until they tried it. Layer0 customers are able to focus on improving their apps without distraction. Isn’t that the point in paying a vendor for software infrastructure?

Benefits of the Layer0 Platform

Layer0-powered websites are some of the fastest in the world — sub-second web page loads lead to huge business benefits in traffic, conversions and revenue.

Security is integrated into the platform, making DDoS, WAF, and Bot Management accessible from the same toolsets.

And critically, Layer0 is built by developers for developers. Here are some of the key aspects of the platform for the teams that build and release web and mobile applications.

Teams on Layer0 release up to twice as fast as ordinary teams

Companies with top-tier developer velocity enjoy many benefits — faster time to market with new features, better return on investment, even faster revenue growth.

Here are just a few of the benefits of the Layer0 platform:

• Make the Edge a first-class citizen in your app — not an afterthought in your workflow — with EdgeJS, the world’s first JavaScript-configurable CDN.
• Emulate the CDN and edge locally — never deploy to staging just to test your CDN rules.
• DevTools shows at-a-glance opportunities to improve performance.
• Easy Cache Key Normalization and Cache Splitting.
  
  

The world's most programmable and fastest web application CDN and edge platform:

Here are just a few of the powers your builder team can leverage:

• Internet-scale: Layer0 runs on the Limelight network, which features 140 total global points of presence (POPs), direct peering with over 1000 global last-mile providers, and 110 Tbps capacity.
• Fastest edge compute in the market.
• Predictive prefetching into the browser extends the edge to the visitor’s device.
• GraphQL caching to accelerate performance of the latest APIs.
• Highest cache hit rates in the market.
• Unique monitoring tools for cache hit rates.
  
  

Release with confidence

Your DevOps team can release with confidence that your customers are getting exactly what you intended. Here are some ‘full stack’ variations that include the browser code, edge code, and cloud serverless code in one atomic package.

• Point-and-click traffic routing and splitting at the edge — much easier to use than those tools within traditional CDNs that have no understanding of your application code.
• Canary and blue/green deploys let you safely push updates.
• Feature flags (aka dark features) with a lot more coming in the roadmap.
• A/B testing at the edge that doesn’t slow down your website that integrates with all the leading experimentation platforms.
  
  

Evolve toward microservices

If you want to plan for success in the future, you’re likely considering headless architectures and more microservices. Rest easy.

• Layer0 is the performance leader for headless websites, so you’re already have a head start.
• Layer0 has an incremental migration approach that makes it easy: migrate one page at a time, without having to change the underlying architecture, automatically routing requests to either the legacy site or the new site.
• The platform supports 45 of the top Jamstack platforms and counting. For more information see the supported frameworks page on the Layer0 website.