What is Varnish?
Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture.
Varnish is a tool in the Web Cache category of a tech stack.
Varnish is an open source tool with 901 GitHub stars and 201 GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Varnish's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Varnish?
Companies
9305 companies reportedly use Varnish in their tech stacks, including Pinterest, Udemy, and Twitch.
Developers
2271 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Varnish.
Varnish Integrations
Datadog, Netdata, SignalFx, Blackfire.io, and Section are some of the popular tools that integrate with Varnish. Here's a list of all 9 tools that integrate with Varnish.
Pros of Varnish
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Varnish's Features
- Powerful, feature-rich web cache
- HTTP accelerator
- Speed up the performance of your website and streaming services
Varnish Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Varnish?
NGINX
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.
Redis
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams.
HAProxy
HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.
Apache Traffic Server
It is a fast, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.0 compliant caching proxy server.Improve your response time, while reducing server load and bandwidth needs by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages, images, and web ser
Squid
Squid reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on most available operating systems, including Windows and is licensed under the GNU GPL.
