Varnish Enterprise 6 (Red Hat)

My main use case for Varnish Enterprise  was to provide speed improvements for websites that we were creating for our clients through a SaaS service, which was a no-code website builder. We wanted to have Varnish Enterprise  as a caching layer in between.

This specific example was part of the website builder itself. When people created their own websites, they were hosted in our system and served through the Varnish Enterprise layer, functioning as a private CDN . We had servers closer to user locations from which we served these websites. Before and after implementation, there was a marked difference in the speed of the systems, and the users noticed it as well. There was significant improvement in the user experience.

The best features of Varnish Enterprise include caching performance, which I believe is best in its class and was the main reason we selected it. Varnish Enterprise offers more granular control on the cache and cache control, allowing us to fine-tune the caching behavior and route traffic in a custom way. The cache control and invalidation logic enabled us to purge requests instantly, which was valuable.

Varnish Enterprise has impacted my organization positively by showing marked improvement in the speed at which websites were being served. The clients were happy with that, and the people who owned or created those websites were satisfied. This had a positive impact, as we likely had more revenue as a result.

Varnish Enterprise can be improved, particularly on the security features, as it does not differentiate itself compared to Cloudflare  because it only provides the usual TLS termination and load balancing capabilities. If there is an area where it can improve itself, it would be on the security side.

Mutual TLS termination is something I wish was included. I have not used Varnish Enterprise for the last three years, so I cannot confirm whether this feature is now included, but at the time we were using it, we did not see that feature.

I am not using Varnish Enterprise currently, but in my previous organization, I used it for around eighteen months.

I do not recall the exact revenue figures, but the speed improvement was significant. It was at least a forty percent improvement in the speed at which websites loaded, which was great.

We implemented Varnish Enterprise by using the Helm charts that Varnish provides in the backend. It has been around three years since we did this implementation, so the exact details are a bit unclear, but I do remember the impact of it. We evaluated it against other solutions, including Fastly  and Cloudflare , and Varnish Enterprise served us well.

I would rate Varnish Enterprise at least eight out of ten.

I chose eight out of ten because the product needs to work on the security part of things. Additionally, while it does give a lot of granular control, it requires a lot of effort to achieve those controls. There was considerable effort from our side to achieve those granular controls on the caching logic, invalidation, and other aspects. If those could be easier to accomplish, I would give it a ten.

Regarding Varnish Enterprise's AI capabilities, I used it three years ago, and there were not many AI capabilities at that point in time, so I cannot comment on this. I did not have any experience with Varnish Enterprise's AI capabilities regarding the accuracy and reliability of output.

Varnish Enterprise is a great product because the core part works very well, achieving speed and cache validation, invalidation, and control logic. If those looking for these particular features, it is a great product. I have not seen the updated product and have not used it in the last couple of years, so I do not have any other thoughts.

My overall rating for Varnish Enterprise is eight out of ten.

My main use case for Varnish Enterprise  is mostly cache. When I say mostly cache, I mean we get directly into Varnish and we edit the rules with VCL files.

In my opinion, the best features Varnish Enterprise  offers are excellent. What makes those features stand out for me is the flexibility and configuration options because we can edit mostly everything about the request and a specific response for a specific request.

Varnish Enterprise has positively impacted my organization because the response time is an upgrade. The improved response time has benefited my organization as the response time for HTTP requests is more efficient and quick.

I think Varnish Enterprise can be improved as the prices can be cheaper. Besides the price, I do not think there is anything else that could be better.

I have been using Varnish Enterprise for about three years.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is difficult as some clients do not want to pay so much.

I do not want to add anything else about the features. The price and the feasibility of implementation keep Varnish Enterprise from being a perfect ten for me. I rate Varnish Enterprise overall as an eight out of ten.

We implemented the solution for web caching in 2022. We auto-update the tool so that we don't face any security issues. We are a broadcasting company. We have many OTT clients that request a lot of images. We use a customized server that resizes images on the fly or transforms them in a different format. It’s a legacy product. It's no longer fully supported. We don't have much choice there, but getting any fixes is difficult. However, with our growth and volume over the years, these things just don't cope anymore.

Ultimately, the traffic just kills the servers. So, we put Varnish in front of the cache and reduced the traffic to the service by about 98%. Instead of being bombarded with 40 million requests every day, it's now down to one million. We used more than 15 servers before. Now, with a bit of redundancy, we have reduced it to four. It is quite a lot. I haven't seen any issues on the server for one and a half years since we deployed Varnish, so it's pretty good.

The programmability is fun to use. I get direct access to the pipeline. I use it to correct a few things that our clients and servers don't like. So I do some on-the-fly corrections and a little hacking, and it works better. The tool is really easy to install, very light, and extremely fast. It requires low maintenance. I'm quite pleased with the product. It is easy to learn the product. It's all documented properly.

The person who wants to learn the tool must know how to deal with such products. However, it is relatively simple. It's running well in our organization, and nobody needs to touch it. We haven't really touched any configuration in over a year as it's still working great. It has been running my same VCL code ever since initial deployment. It has been running stable since, apart from some minor optimizations here and there.

The monitoring features could be improved for an enterprise solution. We can see quite a few things, but getting better visibility on what is going wrong would be nice. If I really need to pinpoint an issue or find something in the ongoing traffic, it's a bit clunky and laborious but not impossible. It can be done, but it's all command-line. These monitoring features could use a bit more modernized interfaces for easier access. Things like Elasticsearch and Kibana integration would be nice. It would be nice to have something graphical/queryable like that to dig deeper into what's happening.

I have been using the solution for more than one and a half years. I am using the latest version of the solution.

The tool is very stable. I haven't seen any issues.

Our company was taken over some time ago and other teams are using Varnish as a CDN  product, but they are in a different country. My team has two maintainers/operators for varnish.

Initially, I deployed the product using the open-source version, and I'm still running that VCL code. Technically, I can switch back to the open-source version at any point because I'm not running any enterprise code except for the service itself,makes negotiating for a good deal very effective too.

I did all of the grunt work (test setup, load test, VCL code, etc) myself before presenting the solution and getting it approved for production use.

We have basic access to supportm but so far we're good with that. We got quite a good deal for three years, so I'm not unhappy with our investment. Our ROI seems to be quite decent for the deal we got in the end.

We got a decent deal on the product. Since we had very limited feature usage, we pushed for a good deal. Since we are not using high-end features and open source would suffice, we can get the tool for a cheaper price.

We were using some vendor products before. They were relatively slow, and we had to add more servers as the vendor just likes to scale horizontally. The product was not performing well with increasing load and issues kept appearing leading to end-user impact and a lot of manual maintenance. We ended up with 20 servers for a very minimalistic setup. It did nothing and still had issues. I just googled a bit and chose Varnish (open source) to try it, impressed with the results we went for the Enterprise version to ensure support.

My recommendation: it depends on the use cases. If you have a lot of files, if your servers get hammered quite badly, or if you are doing images or video delivery, first look at your traffic patterns and analyze what's going on. Generally, Varnish’s out-of-the-box product is quite simple but the power comes from the VCL code. Just running it should bring an improvement but make sure to look at the VCL code, the programmatic layer where we can play with the pipeline and make all kinds of adjustments.

We can filter, rectify or block things via VCL. The caching mechanisms ensure that all our clients receive proper delivery of their images. Traffic doesn't kill our legacy image servers anymore.

We connected our load balancer and configured Varnish to connect to the image servers to pick them up. The integration was very simple.

Our use case itself is quite simple. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten, given that the monitoring and statistical analysis could be better. If we consider the product as a whole and look at the added value of Enterprise, I would rate it a six out of ten, but we do not use the features much. Enterprise has a nice UI where I can do basic monitoring. Though the UI is nice to have, I can also run it through the command line.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight and a half out of ten.