Ruby Central is thrilled to announce our partnership with Fastly, a leader in edge cloud services, to boost the speed, security, and stability of Ruby’s open source infrastructure. 

Fastly has committed over half a million dollars in in-kind services to Ruby Central over the next five years. This support will be crucial for projects like RubyGems and Bundler, ensuring they continue to perform at their highest level as the Ruby ecosystem grows.

What is Fastly?

Fastly provides an edge cloud platform that makes things happen instantly, anywhere across the internet. It is best known for getting content to many millions of users every day and making many of your favorite sites and apps speedy, personalized, and secure.

If you’ve ever downloaded a Ruby gem in the past several years, Fastly’s infrastructure was likely working behind the scenes. Their network optimizes content delivery while maintaining low-latency responses, which is essential for large-scale applications like RubyGems.

Fastly has also been a strong supporter of open source software for years, contributing its technology to help projects like ours scale.

What does this mean for Ruby developers?

If you use RubyGems or Bundler, Fastly will continue to enhance their speed and reliability by caching and distributing gem downloads through its global CDN. This means faster downloads, better response times, and less strain on Ruby Central's infrastructure.

Fastly’s platform also includes built-in security features, which will help protect RubyGems from security threats like DDoS attacks. 

Impact on Ruby Central

By covering infrastructure costs in a multi-year commitment, Fastly is helping Ruby Central navigate the ongoing challenges of maintaining large-scale open source package managers like RubyGems. 

As the ecosystem grows—both in terms of the number of gems and the developers relying on them—so do the demands on our infrastructure. With Fastly, RubyGems will scale seamlessly to meet these demands, offering stability and sustainability in the long term. 

With this partnership, Ruby Central can focus on improving and supporting the tools that power the Ruby community, while the community can remain confident that our infrastructure will keep up with the increasing demand.