Instant Varnish Cache How-to

Hands-on recipes to improve your website’s load speed and overall user experience with Varnish Cache

Overview

• Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results.
• Connect and health-check application servers with Varnish Cache.
• Load balance requests across clustered servers.
• Define caching policies and request/response workflow.

In Detail

When you’re doing business on the Web, every second counts. 80 percent of the end user response time is spent on downloading content to the browser, and Varnish Cache is here to help you solve this problem in a simple and effective way.

“Varnish Cache How-to” is a practical, hands-on guide that will take you from beginner to advanced, improving your website speed and dropping the bounce and page abandonment rates of your website. With easy-to-follow recipes, this book will help you take advantage of caching your application server’s response to avoid a duplicated workload.

This book will take you from the installation of the Varnish Cache server to defining caching policies, the normalization of static content, and a final production-ready fast and scalable cache server.

You will learn to balance requests across servers based on input data or pre-defined settings, create persisted sessions (sticky sessions), compress static content, and modify requests. If you want to improve the speed and also provide a fail-over mechanism to achieve a fast and available website, then this book is for you.

By the end of this book, you’ll learn how to scale and improve the user’s experience by providing a fast and available website.

What you will learn from this book

• Install and configure Varnish Cache.
• Connect application servers to Varnish Cache.
• Load balance requests.
• Request and response workflow inside the Varnish.
• Caching and compressing static content.
• Session and cookie handling.
• Invalidating stale content.

Approach

Filled with practical, step-by-step instructions and clear explanations for the most important and useful tasks. Get the job done and learn as you go. Easy-to-follow, step-by-step recipes which will get you started with Varnish Cache. Practical examples will help you to get set up quickly and easily.

Who this book is written for

This book is aimed at system administrators and web developers who need to scale websites without tossing money on a large and costly infrastructure. It’s assumed that you have some knowledge of the HTTP protocol, how browsers and server communicate with each other, and basic Linux systems.