Democratizing Pantheon's Global CDN to All Customers

For nearly a decade, every site on Pantheon has sat behind a global edge network that handled caching, TLS termination, and traffic routing. It did its job quietly, and you rarely had to think about it. That was the point.

But the web has changed since that CDN was first put in place, especially in the last few years. That’s why we’ve rebuilt our Global CDN from the ground up with Cloudflare, so that all sites can get stronger protection against malicious, automated traffic.

A typical site today fields a meaningfully different traffic mix than it did even three years ago:

• More bots than people on most sites. Some are helpful (search engines, monitoring), some are wasteful (commodity scrapers), and a growing number are AI training crawlers that didn't exist when the original CDN was designed.
• Higher expectations for edge intelligence. "Just cache it" isn't enough anymore. Customers want to shape traffic, block patterns, and reason about what's happening at the edge in near real time.
• Tighter security and compliance demands. Modern WAF capabilities and stronger bot management are now table stakes.

Why we rebuilt our Global CDN

We considered many options, from adding layers on top of the existing CDN to buying a bolt-on bot management product. In the end, we decided to do the harder thing and rebuild the edge itself on newer infrastructure in partnership with Cloudflare. Today's edge networks are programmable platforms with built-in bot management, DDoS mitigation, WAF rules, and edge compute, among other things.

What's new

Security and bot protection

Our new edge brings managed protections that adapt to evolving threats, instead of relying on static rules we update by hand. Every request is now scored for the likelihood of being automated, and verified bots like Googlebot and Bingbot are allowlisted separately from generic scraper traffic. For most sites, this shift from a fixed ruleset to an adaptive, managed system is the biggest immediate upgrade you'll notice.

No action is needed on your part. Global CDN has been automated for all sites.*

A platform we can build on

Better bot protection is the headline change today, but it's not the whole reason we rebuilt the edge. The bigger payoff is that we're now on a programmable edge, which means we can finally give you the kind of control over edge behavior that customers have been asking for.

Eventually, you’ll be able to shape traffic from the Pantheon Dashboard and configure behavior at the site level for each feature via our Advanced Edge Experience (currently in production).

*Please note that if you're currently on Advanced Global CDN (AGCDN), you're already covered — your migration will come in a later phase, and we'll handle the details, so there's nothing you need to do right now.