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Varnish for Beginners: About it, benefits and more!

So we talked much about Varnish Cache and I posted several tutorials already. But however I think there have to be at least  one article explaining about what Varnish Cache is. If you require an easy-to-use, dynamically-proven and open source HTTP accelerator for your content-rich websites or heavily consumed APIs; Varnish is the word to rely! It is quite different than other forms of proxy servers in the sense that while others of almost same niche servers support FTP, network protocols and SMTP; Varnish is primarily focused on HTTP.

varnish guru

Varnish is open source HTTP accelerator available under a two-clause BSD license. Commercial support is available from Varnish Software, amongst others. Source – Wikipedia

Release dates:

  • Version 1.0 in 2006
  • Varnish 2.0 in 2008
  • Varnish 3.0 in 2011
  • Varnish 4.0 in 2014

The varnish has had a low beginning; taken to practice by the online branch of the Norwegian tabloid newspaper Verdens Gang and was initially developed by Danish consultant Poul-Henning Kamp but it was slowly popularized by high profile and content rich websites that started using it to manage their dynamic content. The use of Varnish in newspapers and sites, namely The New York Times, The Guardian, The Hindu, Wikipedia, etc. made it on the front line of the limelight and now a good number of sites are using it.

Also read:

Here’s why you need to use Varnish

The benefits

1. Quick Purge for Improved Performance

Varnish is compatible with instant purging capabilities, which help its management to quickly cache dynamic content. According to the officials, it has a relatively modern architecture and it is written for improved performance.

2. Reverse Proxying

Varnish helps in the reverse proxing. That means if it receives a request for content from a user which is yet to be cached, it will reach out to the customer’s origin server and then fetch the necessary item which is requested. And then it will send the necessary data to the user who has requested it.

3. Instant Data Monitoring Facility

Varnish helps in the real time monitoring of your content. You can even manage and monitor and fetch seconds of data stats. The real time data monitoring process helps the management of data monitoring.

There is a range of benefits which are helpful for a website owner. Using Varnish to strategize data and then carefully implementing the process of manually managing the process of content publish has turned the task a real simple. The core benefit of using Varnish is however developing a super fast experience. The effects and the benefits of Varnish is however, felt by the end front anonymous users, but considering the fact that most high profile and content rich websites core users are anonymous; the effects are however great.

The potential of caching timely data, the benefit of managing high profile websites, and offering real time stats from anonymous browsing helps make Varnish a really improved HTTP accelerator for websites.

While Drupal has a number of high profile accelerator necessarily helpful, but it is easy and that Varnish is easiest to set up and offer fastest speed benefits.

Varnish is open source and is free and easy to set up and flows of development from different developers are ensuring it a workable edge.

About the Author:

Vaishnavi Agrawal loves pursuing excellence through writing and have a passion for technology. She has successfully managed and run personal technology magazines and websites. She currently writes for Intellipaat, a global training company that provides e-learning and professional certification training.

The courses offered by Intellipaat address the unique needs of working professionals. She is based out of Bangalore and has an experience of 5 years in the field of content writing and blogging. Her work has been published on various sites related to Hadoop, Big Data, Qlikview Training, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, IT, SAP, Project Management and more.

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