What you need to know about Advanced Global CDN

When we launched Pantheon’s Global CDN back in 2017, we did so to deliver a faster and more secure experience to the hundreds of thousands of sites that rely on Pantheon every single day. As the closest point of contact to end users, the edge offers a unique place to provide essential security and reliable functionality. Now, in 2020, we are pleased to take that work a step further by announcing the launch of Pantheon’s Advanced Global CDN. 

Advanced Global CDN is designed for customers that require unique optimizations essential to running enterprise-level sites at scale. Through integrating powerful edge functionality like domain masking, localization, Persistent Uptime, and enterprise-grade WAF into Pantheon, we empower advanced delivery teams to take their WebOps to the next level. Our goal is to help those teams collaborate better on the development, testing, and releasing of powerful functionality for their sites. 

Unlock Growth Through Iteration

At Pantheon, we invite you to “Kill the Website Relaunch” by embracing an Agile and an iterative style of development. Why struggle through a long and painful website relaunch cycle, when you can incrementally build the website you want right now? Our existing Multidev cloud development environments and cloud integration tools already help teams move faster. With Pantheon’s Advanced Global CDN, web teams can unlock the power of domain masking to help increase their overall deployment velocity. 

Domain masking allows organizations to manage a single, unified domain, and allows granular routing of each page request at the edge to a specific backend site. For example, a team migrating a site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 can use domain masking to immediately release a completed section of work, without waiting for the rest of the site to be migrated. That same organization can also leverage the unique functionality of another CMS, like WordPress, to power another section of the site. All of this work can happen under a single domain with the same URL structure, maintaining a seamless user and SEO experience.

Edge Based Logic Control & Personalization

The edge offers a unique place to exercise control over your website experience like never before. By leveraging custom logic at the edge, organizations can provide localized content through fast and accurate location-based blocking and redirection. This allows control of your messaging, brand, and intellectual property at a granular level.

Logic at the edge also allows your marketing team to drive forward with a consumer-centric website design process. The internet is a diverse place with diverse needs. Running personalized content marketing experiments at the edge can help optimize your site visitor experiments and help you drive a successful Agile marketing strategy. This can all be done quickly and securely on the edge before your CMS even starts!

Unlock New Heights in Performance and Reliability

Pantheon already offers best in class website performance and reliability through our unique platform architecture and customer success operation. Pantheon’s Advanced Global CDN allows for additional performance optimizations through edge-based image optimization. Why bother your CMS with an image request when you can offload that work? Pantheon’s edge can effortlessly provide a device and bandwidth-appropriate image to your site’s visitor at lightning-fast speed. 

Want to achieve continual uptime for your website content? Our Persistent Uptime functionality will cache the last known, good version for all of your pages and, in the unlikely event of a website disruption, will return the known, good version instead of a dreaded error page. Even during an outage or network hiccup, your visitors can still immerse themselves in your content. 

Powerful Edge-Based Security

The internet is a dangerous place and only getting more dangerous. On top of the industry leading website security Pantheon already offers, our Advanced Global CDN unlocks a host of next-generation security features only available on the edge. A web application firewall (WAF) keeps sites secure by inspecting each web request before it is sent to the CMS and rapidly applying security rules to ensure site integrity. Pantheon’s WordPress and Drupal experts have already written CMS-specific rules and will update them as new threats are identified.

Do I need Advanced Global CDN?

Of course, Pantheon will continue to provide our basic Global CDN to all of our customers free of charge. This core functionality of Pantheon has already helped hundreds of thousands of sites deliver rich web experiences by rendering pages with extraordinary speed and security through over 70 points of presence powered by Fastly’s global edge network and Let’s Encrypt automatic HTTPS certificate management. 

For sites that need additional customization and power, Pantheon Advanced Global CDN is available worldwide starting today as an add-on service to companies looking to empower teams to manage their own sites, enable iterative updating, calibrate control over their brand, and implement enterprise-grade security. Advanced Global CDN is delivered by Pantheon’s highly experienced professional services team who will set up, configure, test, and maintain your Advanced Global CDN so you can focus on growth.