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Case studies

The Varnish Cache Story - How NetActuate Powers Open Source Growth at Scale

The Varnish Cache Story - How NetActuate Powers Open Source Growth at Scale Enabling seamless performance and global reach for open-source leaders

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Overview

NetActuate services provided

Varnish Cache is a leading open-source caching solution designed for internet-scale services, supporting major enterprises like Cloudflare, Fastly, and Rackspace. With its unique approach to HTTP traffic handling, Varnish has become integral to efficient content delivery across the web. Recognizing the critical role it plays in powering online services, NetActuate partnered with the Varnish Cache project to provide the robust infrastructure it needs to operate seamlessly.

Challenge

Varnish Cache required a reliable hosting partner capable of supporting its lightweight, high-performance design. The project’s unique capabilities—powered by its Domain Specific Language (VCL)—enable users to tailor caching and traffic management to their specific needs. However, ensuring uninterrupted service and optimal performance for such a widely used open-source project necessitated dependable, globally distributed infrastructure.

Solution

NetActuate brought its extensive experience in global anycast networks and edge deployments to the table, delivering an infrastructure solution tailored to Varnish Cache’s needs. By hosting the project on one of NetActuate’s smallest yet high-performing virtual machines (VMs), we ensured:

Unmatched reliability: Varnish Cache benefits from NetActuate’s global footprint, ensuring consistent service delivery.
Scalability: The infrastructure is designed to handle growth, supporting the increasing demands of Varnish Cache users.
Efficiency: Varnish’s minimalist design aligns seamlessly with NetActuate’s optimized hosting environment, ensuring resource efficiency and sustainability.

NetActuate provides us with an incredibly stable and efficient hosting environment. It’s remarkable that our entire project runs on what’s probably the tiniest VM NetActuate offers. Their infrastructure has been instrumental in supporting Varnish’s mission to make the internet faster and more reliable.
‍^{Poul-Henning Kamp -}_{a UNIX guru}_&_{Lead developer, Varnish Cache}

The NetActuate Difference

Results

Seamless Performance: NetActuate’s infrastructure ensures Varnish Cache operates with the speed and reliability users expect no matter the scale of HTTP traffic.
Global Reach: Leveraging NetActuate’s anycast network, Varnish Cache is accessible to users worldwide with minimal latency.
Sustainable Operations: Hosting on a lightweight VM reduces resource consumption while maintaining robust performance, supporting the project’s focus on efficiency and environmental sustainability.

Conclusion

What Sets Varnish Cache Apart?

Varnish Cache stands out in the industry for its focus on enabling user-defined features via its VCL. This flexibility allows businesses to create custom solutions for HTTP traffic handling, such as:

Redirecting specific traffic (e.g., CNN.com visitors) with minimal coding.
Implementing A/B testing for different browser languages with just a few lines of VCL.

With its lean codebase of 180,000 lines and rigorous quality assurance (90%+ code coverage), Varnish Cache handles a significant portion of global HTTP traffic, proving its reliability and scalability.