Why developers like Varnish

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 903 GitHub stars and 207 GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Varnish's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Varnish?

Companies

9196 companies reportedly use Varnish in their tech stacks, including Pinterest, Vox Media, and Twitch.

Vox Media

Twitch

Stack

The New York ...

Accenture

GO-JEK

trivago

9GAG

Developers

1432 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Varnish.

SaaS

Wallhaven

Yosilo.se

tribe

Packages Used ...

m

Alex Topalov ...

FictFact

Justin Hourigan ...

Varnish Integrations

Datadog, Netdata, Section, SignalFx, and Blackfire.io are some of the popular tools that integrate with Varnish. Here's a list of all 7 tools that integrate with Varnish.

Datadog

Netdata

Section

SignalFx

Blackfire.io ...

Server Density ...

Netuitive

Pros of Varnish

102

Web application accelerator

Easy to config

Widely Used

Great community

Essential software for HTTP

Public Decisions about Varnish

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Varnish in their tech stack.

Tom Klein

CEO at Gentlent · a year ago | 9 upvotes · 394.6K views

Shared insights

Git

npm

We're using Git through GitHub for public repositories and GitLab for our private repositories due to its easy to use features. Docker and Kubernetes are a must have for our highly scalable infrastructure complimented by HAProxy with Varnish in front of it. We are using a lot of npm and Visual Studio Code in our development sessions.

StackShare Editors

Aug 3, 2011 | 8 upvotes · 462.2K views

Shared insights

Around the time of their Series A, Pinterest’s stack included Python and Django, with Tornado and Node.js as web servers. Memcached / Membase and Redis handled caching, with RabbitMQ handling queueing. Nginx, HAproxy and Varnish managed static-delivery and load-balancing, with persistent data storage handled by MySQL.

What is the technology stack behind Pinterest? - Quora

Scott Prue

at Kyper · Dec 21, 2017 | 1 upvotes · 9.6K views

Shared insights

Varnish

Pruvit

Used as part of site hosting (Firebase HTTP Hosting manages implementation) Varnish

Poogles

Feb 14, 2015 | 1 upvotes · 9.6K views

Shared insights

Varnish

The Independent

Varnish sits as a secondary cache layer behind Akamai. Two servers operate in a Primary/Secondary configuration with failover managed by HAProxy. Requests peak at around 10k/s. Varnish

Simone Marcato

Partner & CTO at Hevelop · Dec 5, 2018 | 1 upvotes · 9.6K views

Shared insights

Varnish

Hevelop

Varnish is the http cache proxy we use to achieve maximum performance on high traffic e-commerce. Varnish

See all decisions

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, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.

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.

See all alternatives

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