SearchThank you for taking the time to read this book. Writing it was a memorable experience for me, and I hope it brought some inspiration and insight to you immediately and can be a solid reference resource for you in the future as well.
No doubt, we covered a lot of topics, and the scope of this book was pretty broad. This makes sense because this breadth illustrates just how varied the Varnish ecosystem is and paints a brighter, more detailed picture of Varnish being about much more than just writing a couple of lines of VCL.
Some of the key takeaways I hope you got from the book include:
Get started with and develop your hands-on knowledge of Varnish I sincerely hope that by now you are capable of setting up a cluster of Varnish servers, manage them properly, and perform the necessary monitoring and logging to ensure a stable content delivery platform.
Understand in greater depth how important HTTP is Varnish speaks HTTP, so it is important to know how the protocol works. Throughout the book, and especially in chapter 3, you’ve seen the ins and outs of HTTP, and you’ve learned all about its caching capabilities, and some of the specific headers that can be leveraged.
Appreciate that Varnish thrives on driving performance By now it should also be crystal clear that Varnish is built for performance. Some of the numbers I shared are quite impressive and make Varnish one of the fastest content delivery systems in the industry.
See the flexibility and power of the Varnish Configuration Language The unique selling point of Varnish is the Varnish Configuration Language: it is instrumental in offering the right caching experience, but it is even more important from an edge-computing point of view.
Yes, the Varnish Configuration Language (VC)L allows you to make very detailed decisions on when and how to cache content. But the true power of VCL lies in the fact that it can offload logic from the origin to the edge and cache otherwise uncacheable content.
Remember, Varnish is not necessarily a standalone piece of technology.
The Varnish ecosystem is a lot broader than the varnishd program.
As you have learned in this book, there are also a collection of commercial solutions that are under the Varnish Enterprise umbrella, developed and maintained by Varnish Software.
First of all, there is Varnish Enterprise itself. This commercial caching solution adds native features, extra tools and a rich collection of enterprise VMODs on top of Varnish Cache.
In the end, Varnish can be considered CDN technology that powers the delivery of websites, APIs, OTT video streaming platforms, private CDNs, and 5G multi-access edge clouds.
Web performance matters; content delivery matters. I hope we at Varnish Software have convinced you that Varnish is a great tool to address the modern content delivery challenges you may be facing.
Dear Reader, I’ve already thanked you. But I also want to take the opportunity to thank my colleagues who have assisted me during the writing process.
They spent countless hours doing calls, assisting me in describing the ins and outs of Varnish, and coming up with interesting examples and valuable use cases.
As an author I’ll probably get most of the credit. However, I would like to name everyone who was involved in the planning, writing and reviewing process:
Without these people, this book would be a lot less detailed and a lot less interesting. I can even say that there would be no book without these people.
The adoption of Varnish keeps increasing, and it is our aim to provide more and better resources for developers online as well as do more outreach to the open source community. Our ambition is that all organizations with content delivery and edge-compute needs should find Varnish technology to be the best solution.
Varnish Software is continuously growing as a company and attracting more customers that are looking for enterprise-grade content delivery and edge-compute solutions. This means that you can count on Varnish to continue developing even faster, richer functionality and offer availability on the most popular platforms.
The future of Varnish Cache and Varnish Enterprise is bright, and Varnish’s importance in the web acceleration, content delivery, and 5G edge-compute space will continue to increase.
If you would like to know more about Varnish Cache, please visit the official website at http://varnish-cache.org/.
For all things Varnish Software, you can visit https://www.varnish-software.com/.
If you’re interested in more technical resources, VCL examples and tutorials, please visit our developer portal, which will be launched in 2021, at https://developers.varnish-software.com.