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Bridging the Digital Divide: The Endless OS Foundation's Partnership with Fastly
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Middleware & Microservices
- Robots - Robot Operating Systems
Applicable Industries
- Electrical Grids
- Telecommunications
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Last Mile Delivery
- Time Sensitive Networking
The Challenge
The Endless OS Foundation, a social welfare nonprofit, has been working to bridge the digital divide by increasing access to affordable devices and building software that reduces the need for high-speed connectivity. However, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the digital divide, causing a surge in demand for online educational content. As a result, the Foundation saw an increase in downloads and updates, leading to a spike in egress costs. Their existing content delivery network (CDN) was unable to provide efficient solutions, and they were experiencing CDN dead zones in regions like Southeast Asia, Central, and South America, where they have a significant number of users. The quality of their service was inconsistent, and costs were continually increasing.
About The Customer
The Endless OS Foundation is a 501c4 social welfare nonprofit whose mission is to help all people and communities connect with technology. They work to bridge the digital divide by increasing access to affordable devices and building software that reduces the need for high-speed connectivity. They partner with organizations like Khan Academy, Common Sense, TED-Ed, and PBS to source educational content for their operating system, which includes video lessons, applications, and over 50,000 Wikipedia articles. They also partner with organizations like World Possible, International Rescue Council, Teach for America, and Save the Children to deploy their OS all over the world, from the Appalachian Mountains to Kenya.
The Solution
The Endless OS Foundation partnered with Fastly, a modern CDN, to improve their delivery. Fastly's segmented caching for large files allowed the Foundation to increase the performance of their largest resources by breaking them into smaller segments in cache, then recombining them. By choosing a long time-to-live (TTL), which is the amount of time information can be retained or cached in a CDN before a fresh copy is fetched from the origin, and by selecting and marking content as outdated for a soft purge, rather than completely purging it from the cache, the Foundation was able to save on egress costs. This had a significant impact on their nonprofit budget and allowed them to focus on future projects, such as faster download speeds, hybrid online/offline resources, and Endless Key, a USB device preloaded with robust internet content for offline use.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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