Varnish Cache on Ubuntu 24.04

Varnish Cache is an open-source HTTP accelerator designed to enhance the speed and performance of web servers by caching static and dynamic content. It sits between clients and backend servers, caching frequently accessed data and delivering it to users with lightning speed. Varnish can handle thousands of requests per second, significantly reducing server load and improving website responsiveness by serving cached content directly from memory. With its flexible VCL (Varnish Configuration Language), users can customize caching behavior, purge caches, and optimize web traffic management.

This Varnish® Cache community edition server is maintained and supported by Cloud Infrastructure Services for Azure deployments.

Varnish Cache Use Cases

• Caching frequently requested static and dynamic content to reduce backend server load.
• Speeding up content delivery for high-traffic websites and applications.
• Accelerating e-commerce platforms by caching product pages and search results.
• Improving performance for content-heavy websites, such as news outlets and blogs.
• Acting as a reverse proxy in front of web servers like Apache or Nginx to boost performance.
• Providing load balancing to distribute requests across multiple backend servers.
• Caching API responses for faster data retrieval in applications with high API traffic.

Varnish Cache Features

• High Performance: Can handle thousands of requests per second by caching content in memory.
• Flexible Caching Policies: Customize caching behavior with Varnish Configuration Language (VCL).
• Backend Agnostic: Works seamlessly with any backend server, such as Apache, Nginx, or others.
• Load Balancing: Distributes requests across multiple backend servers for better performance and redundancy.
• Grace Mode: Serves stale content when the backend is unavailable, ensuring continued service.
• Edge Side Includes (ESI): Supports partial page caching, allowing dynamic and static content to coexist efficiently.
• Logging and Monitoring: Provides robust tools for logging and analyzing cache performance and request handling.
• HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 Support: Fully supports modern web protocols for faster and more secure communication.

Getting started documentation and support from: Varnish Cache on Azure

Disclaimer: Varnish® is a registered trademark of Varnish Software ABC and is licensed under 2-clause BSD License. The license comes with a "no warranty" clause, meaning the software is provided "as-is" without any guarantees or liability for issues that may arise.