Getting Started with Varnish Cache

Chapter 10. Taking It to the Next Level

By now, we’ve established a level of understanding:

• You know what Varnish is and where it fits in

• You know how to install and configure Varnish

• You understand some of the HTTP best practices that Varnish respects

• You can interprete VCL snippets and write some of your own

• You know how to invalidate (parts of) the cache

• You’re familiar with the load-balancing capabilities of Varnish

• You’re able to leverage some of the Varnish logging and monitoring tools

• You know how to adapt your application or your VCL to real-world scenarios

So what’s next? This chapter will point you in the right direction if you want to take it to the next level. I’ll address some specific topics that are beyond the scope of this book and refer to useful resources.

We’ll talk about RESTful services, VMODs, the future of the Varnish project, and ways to get help if you have questions.

What About RESTful Services?

Throughout this book, I’ve been focusing on websites and web applications. But in this day and age, service-oriented architectures have become normal. The idea that software isn’t only consumed by humans but also by other systems has become mainstream. The fact that your application has a feed or an API doesn’t seem that exotic anymore. Nowadays, the application usually is a REST API and the GUI is just a piece of frontend code that consumes it.

That being said, RESTful services are very easy to cache with Varnish. As a matter of fact, Roy Fielding ...