Fastly Inc. has acquired Glitch Inc., the operator of a popular cloud-based software development platform used by more than 1.8 million programmers.

Fastly announced the acquisition today. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

NYSE-listed Fastly operates a popular content delivery network, or CDN, that organizations use to speed up their websites. The CDN stores copies of organizations’ website content in numerous servers around the world. When a user visits a website, content is loaded from the nearest server to reduce loading times.

Fastly also provides other products spanning areas such as edge computing and cybersecurity. The acquisition of Glitch will enable the company to establish a significant presence in yet another market: the developer tooling segment.

Glitch provides a cloud-based code editor that developers can use to create websites and applications. The platform automates many of the time-consuming manual tasks usually involved in software development. 

Often, writing code is only one of several tasks involved in building a website or an application. Developers also have to provision hardware on which their code can run, create a database to store application data and configure other components. Glitch provides pre-configured infrastructure for hosting software that spares users the hassle of building everything from scratch.

Another factor behind Glitch’s popularity is that it streamlines certain code editing tasks. In other software development platforms, finding the specific line of code responsible for an error can require a significant amount of time. Glitch’s platform speeds up the task and provides a tool that enables users to quickly revert a code file to a previous version when an error is discovered, which eases troubleshooting.

Glitch provides its platform’s core feature set for free and generates revenue through a paid version that includes additional capabilities. The startup’s 1.8 million users include developers from major tech companies such as Stripe and Google LLC. Prior to its acquisition by Fastly, Glitch raised $30 million in funding from Tiger Global.

Fastly will make it easier for Glitch users to deploy their applications on its Compute@Edge serverless computing platform. The platform enables developers to run code without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. Moreover, Compute@Edge makes it possible to host application code on hardware located near the application’s users, which reduces latency.

“Compute@Edge already allows enterprise developers to build applications on Fastly’s edge network with all the performance, security, and scale they need,” Fastly Chief Product and Strategy Officer Lakshmi Sharma wrote in a blog post today. “Now we want to unlock a world of possibilities for all developers – from innovators at small to mid-sized companies, to hobbyist developers, to large-scale organizations.”

Cloudflare Inc., one of Fastly’s major competitors in the CDN market, has also made serverless computing an important focus of its product strategy. It provides a serverless platform called Cloudflare Workers that enables developers to deploy code on infrastructure at the edge of the network. This month, the company updated the platform with an integrated relational database called D1 that will help developers more easily manage their applications’ data. 

Photo: Fastly