ROLLER boosts global speed & security with Fastly platform

ROLLER, a cloud-based management platform for attractions, has transformed its technology stack to improve performance and security for thousands of venues worldwide. The company, which supports nearly 3,000 attractions across more than 30 countries, has implemented a range of solutions from Fastly to address key technical challenges as it seeks to remove friction from the guest experience.

Image speed gains

One of the most significant issues facing ROLLER's clients was the slow performance caused by large, high-resolution images uploaded to customer-branded checkout pages. ROLLER evaluated the resources needed to build its own optimisation tool against available third-party options and selected Fastly's Image Optimizer as a turnkey solution.

"Capacity and opportunity cost is always a big thing," said Sean Fernandez, Vice President of Infrastructure and Security at ROLLER. "We realised Fastly was a turnkey solution and a much faster migration to implement."

According to Fernandez, implementing the Image Optimizer resulted in a substantial reduction in image size, leading directly to faster checkout speeds. "On average we saw a 95 per cent reduction in image sizes, which means the latency actually went from about 95 milliseconds to about five milliseconds, which was kind of phenomenal," said Fernandez.

Edge routing capability

ROLLER's global footprint means its requirements for routing user data are complex. While standard content delivery networks offer geo-location routing to bring content closer to users, ROLLER must also meet the needs of venues that require specific data sourcing outlined by geographic or regulatory factors.

Fernandez explained, "You want to get to the closest point, so there's always geo location routing. But that's not good enough when you have customers that have specific data at specific locations, regardless of where they are globally. You want that CDN, but you also want to get to the source data slightly differently."

Fastly's platform allows ROLLER to implement custom logic at the network edge, giving the company more precise control over how traffic is handled. "It feels like Fastly was one of the first companies to deliver on something with compute at the edge," said Fernandez.

Automated security

With a diverse client base processing high volumes of payments, protecting the platform against cyber security threats is a top priority for ROLLER. Traditional web application firewalls (WAFs) often require significant manual rule management, a time-consuming process for infrastructure teams.

"If you've ever played with a WAF system, you have to write your own rules, and they're very specific," said Fernandez. "The Fastly system is fantastic for WAF. You don't have to hand-carve your own rules."

Fastly's Next-Gen WAF was selected for its automated, intelligent threat detection. "It understands what the different types of attacks look like, and it can learn what is actually good behaviour versus not," said Fernandez.

"We know that we're validating the leadership principles of customer obsession. It is fantastic, and that's what we want out of our technology stack," said Sean Fernandez, Vice President of Infrastructure and Security, ROLLER.