Great
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
Using varnish for cdn
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
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Value adding component, securing end user experience and cost efficient
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.
Using Varnish since many years, moved to the paid version a couple of years ago
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
Performance, Quality, Configuration
What do you like best about the product?
Varnish is really fast and powerfull . The Varnish Configuration Langage (VCL) is a must (think embedding Javascript to configure the cache). You can do everything with it.
I use varnish for caching popular content (VOD, Live, Static Assets) on hundred of servers, but also for Load Balancing API. Varnish support also distributed and multi-level of caching.
I haven't found any problems in many years. The support is fast, and helpfull. The support come from the developper so it's very easy to find issue with our hardware.
What do you dislike about the product?
It's difficult to find a flaw for Varnish. Perhaps the cost of the solution ? But when i see the number of times i've open a ticket (3 in 8 years) I think the value is well spent.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Varnish can serve without a flaw severall hundred tv channels, and thousand of VOD contents to our customers. Caching severall terabytes of content is not a easy task, varnish solve it with distribute caching and load-balancing between healthy node. Scaling is not a problem, we just need to increase the number of servers.
Varnish Software: A Simple Review
What do you like best about the product?
The Cache HA Cluster and ESI (Edge Side Includes) features are often considered among the best aspects of Varnish Software due to their capability to optimize web performance and manage content delivery efficiently.
What do you dislike about the product?
One drawback of Varnish Software is the lack of native support for Kubernetes as an ingress controller. While Varnish offers advanced routing, caching, and other features, its compatibility with Kubernetes and cncf solutions is limited, which can hinder its seamless integration within Kubernetes environments. This limitation could potentially be addressed to broaden the software's usage.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Varnish Software solves several problems by providing efficient solutions for content distribution and backend system connections. The use of Edge Side Includes (ESI) allows for server-side distribution of systems without disrupting the frontend. This approach enables efficient content delivery using client-side connections to various backend systems. This benefits us by enhancing performance and maintaining a seamless experience, as the distribution happens effectively at the edge, optimizing the overall system architecture.
THE SPEED BOOST YOUR WEBSITE CRAVES.
What do you like best about the product?
One of the standout features of Varnish Software is its Caching Brilliance.It has significantly boosted our website and application performance by storing frequently accessed content in memory, reducing the load on backend servers. This results in faster page load times and improved user experiences.
What do you dislike about the product?
I have found it to be resource-intensive , particularly in memory usage.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Varnish Software has addressed the challenge of slow website and application performance by caching content closer to the end-user, reducing latency, and improving response times.
Senior Software developer
What do you like best about the product?
It does not need a lot knowelage to start using it
What do you dislike about the product?
does not have enough documentation.
does not have code example in C#, node js
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Cash the end user requests
cash static files
Perfect htyp cache software
What do you like best about the product?
Varnish is very easy to configure, and becomes a kind ok swiss-army knife to handle/debug/optimize http trafic
What do you dislike about the product?
Some modules are only available using souscription.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Varnish helps us reduicing load on web and databases servers
