Launching QuantCDN
Salsa has had the pleasure of using QuantCDN over the past few months for our clients. is the brainchild of Salsa Partner and CTO Stuart Rowlands, who founded QuantCDN in 2020.
QuantCDN is a new way for websites and content to be hosted, secured and served.
The problem Quant solves
Many websites around the world are made up of static content sitting on complex and expensive infrastructure. While there are historical reasons why this is the case, it simply isn’t necessary now.
This realisation inspired QuantCDN to design and build technology that allows you to maintain all the benefits of a content management system, without the downsides of an expensive, slow and vulnerable platform infrastructure. Find out more in Quant founder and CEO Stuart Rowlands’ blog Back to the .
What is Quant?
Quant is technology that generates and serves a static version of your website to your audience. The Quant technology sits between your website and your visitors.
For the techies the Quant technology creates a static version of your website and deploys it to a global edge network in real time.
It extends on the existing Jamstack paradigm by providing a way to join the static web revolution without a need to re-architect your existing solutions.
Quant benefits
Quant does 3 simple things:
Increases speed — It drastically improves user response times and thus the user experience.
Increases security — It reduces the attack surface; users interact with a static representation of your content, allowing you to better protect your application layer.
Reduces costs — It significantly reduces the hosting infrastructure required, which in turn significantly reduces the cost to serve and the cost to scale.
How does it work?
Quant works with your existing site — so no re-architecture, no replatforming, no migrations. This means you can realise the static-web benefits and ‘instantly’ leverage your existing CMS platform investment and content workflows.
This is a notable and disruptive point of difference over other emerging static web companies.
As an example, the Quant team created a new Drupal module that you essentially “plugin”. This module monitors for all content changes. When a content change is detected, it simply generates a static version of your page and deploys it to our global edge network.
View an example of the popular Drupal 9 demo site (Umami) exported with a single . It even has functional via the optional Quant Search extension (powered by ).
Other high value features and use cases
Three other features/benefits of Quant are:
Failover: Keep an up-to-date, static representation to failover to in the case of application failure.
Archiving: Quant automatically keeps a full revision history, and a simple interface to view historic content revisions.
Zero-day exploits: Zero-day exploits give vendors no time to patch and react to exploitable holes in software products. With a static representation you can protect your application layer until a mitigation is released, staying safe during periods of extreme risk.
Quant is always free for open source .
About Salsa and QuantCDN
QuantCDN is led by Salsa Partner and CTO Stuart Rowlands. It’s been developed by a team of digital engineers across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
QuantCDN is a separate organisation, but Salsa has co-invested in the initial development of QuantCDN, and some members of Salsa's leadership separately serve as part of the QuantCDN executive team.
Why QuantCDN for Salsa Digital?
Salsa is an open source company made up of digital engineers delivering technology and innovation that help governments digitally transform, better engage with citizens, and open up to co-create and co-innovate with industry.
One of our major services is hosting, developing and managing websites for governments. These websites deliver critical information to citizens and also have the highest and strictest levels of security, performance and resilience requirements.
When Salsa Partner and CTO pitched the idea of Quant, we fell in love instantly. Understanding the pains and patterns of what it takes to host, manage, secure and scale ‘government-grade’ websites, QuantCDN just made sense.
And so we were keen to invest, contribute and be a part of the QuantCDN journey.
As part of this journey we are now actively working with a handful of government clients to deploy Quant into their website projects.
To learn more about QuantCDN please visit the official QuantCDN .