Varnish Enterprise is our main solution to improve web performance and scalability by acting as a high-performance reverse proxy and caching layer in front of our application servers. Varnish Enterprise specifically helps with performance by reducing response time. Cached content is served directly from memory, which is significantly faster than generating it from the application layer. It also provides lower backend load and efficient handling of concurrent users.
Varnish Enterprise 6 Developer Edition (Ubuntu)
Varnish Software IncExternal reviews
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Caching layer has boosted performance and has simplified high-traffic web delivery
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
Beyond pure caching, we also use Varnish Enterprise as a control and optimization layer in front of our application. Beyond the main performance use case, we leverage it for advanced request handling and routing, security and backend protection. We also use it for grace and high-availability strategies and operational flexibility.
The best features Varnish Enterprise offers include high-performance caching, in-memory caching for ultra-fast content delivery, the flexible Varnish Configuration Language with full control over request and response logic, and Grace Mode and stale serving.
The flexible configuration language and Grace Mode specifically benefit our team by allowing us to implement complex routing, caching, and header logic at the edge without touching the backend code. This speeds up deployment and allows for quick experiments, such as A/B testing or custom cache rules.
Varnish Enterprise combines performance with observability and control. Fast-purge and selective invalidation give us precise control over content freshness without full cache clears.
Varnish Enterprise has had a significant positive impact on our organization with faster performance, reduced backload, better handling of traffic spikes, operational flexibility, and improved reliability.
What needs improvement?
A few areas where Varnish Enterprise could be improved are the management interface, where VCL is powerful, and a more intuitive visual interface for cache rule routing and purge could speed up operational tasks. It could also have more granular analytics, simpler multi-backend orchestration, integration with a modern observability stack, and edge computing features. Adding lightweight compute or scripting at the edge could allow for more dynamic content.
Easier deployment of VCL updates, better support for modern protocols, or more automated cache invalidation options could be considered for needed improvements.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Varnish Enterprise for around three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Varnish Enterprise is absolutely stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability of Varnish Enterprise is an amazing point.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support is adequate.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before adopting Varnish Enterprise, we primarily used a combination of open-source Varnish and basic NGINX caching.
How was the initial setup?
Integrating Varnish Enterprise with our existing infrastructure was absolutely easy.
What was our ROI?
We have seen a tangible return on investment with Varnish Enterprise, and some real metrics include backend load reduction, response time improvement, operational efficiency, and downtime mitigation.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Our experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been generally positive, but there are a few considerations. It is a subscription-based model rather than a one-time license, which scales with traffic and the number of servers. For the setup cost, initial setup requires some engineering time. While not cheap, the investment pays off through reduced backend load, faster response time, and better stability, which often outweigh the subscription cost.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated NGINX Plus, Cloudflare, and Fastly before choosing Varnish Enterprise for its flexibility, performance, and backend protection.
What other advice do I have?
In our environment, Varnish Enterprise handles high availability and failover through a combination of redundancy, health checks, and Grace Mode.
The performance of Varnish Enterprise compared to other caching solutions I have used or considered is extremely positive.
The security of Varnish Enterprise is amazing. It meets my organization's requirements and is the best, in my opinion.
The documentation has a learning curve, but it is good. For me, it is perfect.
The monitoring and observability in Varnish Enterprise provide enough visibility for my team, but it requires some setup.
Varnish Enterprise handles custom logic, such as A/B testing or personalized content delivery, through its Varnish Configuration Language, which gives full control over request and response processing, A/B testing, personalized content, and edge logic.
My advice to others looking into using Varnish Enterprise is to start with clear caching goals. Invest time in learning VCL. Monitor cache effectiveness, leverage Grace Mode, and test in a staging environment.
I have rated this review a ten out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Easy to install, very light, extremely fast, and provides direct access to the pipeline
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for more than one and a half years. I am using the latest version of the solution.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The tool is very stable. I haven't seen any issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
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