SearchThanks for sticking around because that was quite the trip. This chapter is by far the longest one, but in our opinion also the most exciting one.
It goes to show that there’s a lot more to Varnish than writing some VCL and putting Varnish in front of your web server.
Deploying Varnish at scale and using it to build a content delivery
platform results in extra concerns and requirements that go beyond a
single varnishd instance with 256MB of object caching.
Hopefully this chapter inspired you to use the various tools that the Varnish project offers.
There’s no denying that Varnish’s logging and monitoring tools offer unprecedented levels of insight compared to regular web servers.
And although Varnish Cache is used by millions of websites at incredible scale, this chapter has shown where Varnish Enterprise really shines. In terms of security, high availability, custom statistics, large-scale persistent storage and cluster management, Varnish Enterprise provides the goods.
Don’t get me wrong, although I work at Varnish Software, and although I use Varnish Enterprise on a daily basis, this is not a commercial pitch. This book is all about features and capabilities, and hopefully you are convinced about the technical capabilities of both the project and the product.
In my experience, Varnish usually ends up being the responsibility of the ops team. That’s why this Varnish for operations chapter deserves the amount of effort, the level of detail, the diverse topics, and the page count that we’ve put into it.
Get ready for chapter 8 where we will take VCL to the next level. Varnish is more than a take-it-or-leave-it cache, and even in situations where application state prevents us from caching, there are ways to implement stateful logic on the edge and still cache the content.