Varnish Enterprise 6 (Ubuntu)

What do you like best about the product?

I like that they are building tools to help organizations

What do you dislike about the product?

They need to pay more attention to their developers

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Increased scalability and reduced server load

What do you like best about the product?

We use varnish in our developing cdn infrastructure

What do you dislike about the product?

it's powerful language is also steepy to learning at the beginning

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We need a cache in our cdn servers

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.

On-premises

What do you like best about the product?

It is flexible, securing our web development from request to response from client to backend and back again. Cost efficient, fast load to clients, low usage of backend infrastructure. High availability.

What do you dislike about the product?

Very hard to say anything less good about Varnish. It's a technical product, built by technical people for technical usage, But make everyone happy from technicians to end users. One thing is that is so in front line of services to manage subscription thats its harder for a large company with security regulations to manage installation media and patches, but that problem is more on our side rather than problem with Varnish.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Performance, fast responses. Securing backend. High availability with grace functionality.

What do you like best about the product?

linear encoding cache, plenty of configuration possibilities

What do you dislike about the product?

not very big benefits in using the paid version instead of the open source one

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

caching and avoiding internet traffic to reach internal server