Caching with Varnish: from web acceleration to content delivery
Backend, Given on 27 June 2023
About this talk
When your website is under pressure due to a massive influx of traffic and a severe increase of concurrent requests, you are generally presented two options: optimize your stack or scale your infrastructure. Luckily there’s a third option and that is using a reverse caching proxy to offload the pressure from your origin servers. Thijs Feryn will introduce us to Varnish, a well-known and well respected HTTP cache. He will talk about common strategies to improve the performance of your website and to make it more resilient when the pressure is on. Thijs will cover Varnish’s built-in features and capabilities and he will focus heavily on Varnish’s built-in programming language called “Varnish Configuration Language” (VCL), that allows you to tailor the behavior of the cache to your exact needs. As the domains of application of the HTTP protocol expand beyond basic websites, so do the acceleration solutions. In a globally connected world where end-user quality of experience is front end center, he will also show us how Varnish can be used to build an Edge CDN that accelerates websites, APIs and OTT video streaming platforms.