Varnish Enterprise Reviews

I used Varnish Enterprise for caching at the application side, and within the application layer, there was one layer dedicated for Varnish where we maintained cache. Whatever needed to be cached and refreshed via cache was handled by Varnish, and the rest of the requests were sent to the backend servers.

I handled a project where any request triggered by the user via load balancer would go to the backend servers, and in the middle layer, there was a Varnish Enterprise layer. If we wanted to cache specific data such as /XYZ or /data or /API, when that path was requested, it was served by Varnish Enterprise, which prevented those specific paths from going to backend systems repeatedly because they were system-agnostic requests. Other requests were routed to the backend servers via Varnish Enterprise.

One of the best features Varnish Enterprise offers is how it maintains the cache, serving it via memory, which is very fast and helpful in our case. We did not want to add extra layers or scale our backend servers too much for cost reasons, and Varnish Enterprise was able to handle those requests well with its memory, as memory I/O is significantly faster than file system I/O.

The configuration of Varnish Enterprise was easy because it uses Varnish Configuration Language, which takes some time to get used to, but it is manageable. I particularly appreciated the request routing feature; if a cached request is not found, Varnish Enterprise dynamically routes the request to backend servers. It also shields the backend traffic and IPs, adding an advantage.

The challenge we solved with Varnish Enterprise is that it reduced RAM and resource consumption on the backend servers. When we added Varnish Enterprise, we did not see any spike in resource usage, but after removing it, we experienced a significant spike because all requests went to the backend servers, forcing us to scale up. Adding a single Varnish Enterprise server was enough since it maintained the cache efficiently, allowing for less scaling of the backend servers and containers, making it cost-effective.

Varnish Enterprise positively impacted our organization by saving us a considerable amount of cost. Without Varnish Enterprise, we would need to scale our containers to around two hundred, but with Varnish Enterprise, we maintained fifty to eighty fewer containers while handling the same traffic, which was definitely advantageous.

I think that the usage of Varnish Configuration Language can be improved. It is a bit challenging for new developers and DevOps engineers, and it would be better if it could use a simpler language such as Bash or Python.

Regarding needed improvements, nothing else stands out to add.

I have used Varnish Enterprise for around three and a half to four years.

Varnish Enterprise is stable.

The scalability of Varnish Enterprise is good.

To scale Varnish Enterprise for growing traffic, we created multiple EC2 servers within an auto-scaling group. The servers scale up and down based on the number of incoming requests, using predefined auto-scaling policies.

I have not had the chance to reach out to customer support due to not facing any issues, so I assume it is good.

We tracked the savings by reviewing our AWS infrastructure billing dashboard, which shows usage of services. We compared the infrastructure usage before and after enabling Varnish Enterprise, observing a marginal difference and clear cost effectiveness.

I would rate Varnish Enterprise seven out of ten. I rated it a seven out of ten mainly because of the challenge with Varnish Configuration Language. If it could use a more familiar or custom language for configuration, it would be easier for us to learn and use effectively.

The governance and security of Varnish Enterprise is decent because it does not expose backend servers, IPs, or URLs, making its security good.

The accuracy and reliability of output from Varnish Enterprise's AI capabilities is fine; the responses are crisp and effective.

The integration process of Varnish Enterprise with our existing systems is fairly easy. You just need to configure caching paths and mention the backend server's IP or hostname. At the front end, requests are directed first to Varnish Enterprise, with specific path-based routing applied if necessary.

We handle monitoring and logging for Varnish Enterprise using Prometheus and Grafana, which was straightforward and similar to managing other EC2 servers.

Upgrades and maintenance for Varnish Enterprise have been smooth; we upgrade one server out of the loop, test it in a lower environment, and then replicate the upgrade in production.

I suggest others use Varnish Enterprise because my experience has been good. My overall rating for Varnish Enterprise is seven out of ten.

My main use case for Varnish Enterprise was to provide speed improvements for websites that we were creating for our clients through a SaaS service, which was a no-code website builder. We wanted to have Varnish Enterprise as a caching layer in between.

This specific example was part of the website builder itself. When people created their own websites, they were hosted in our system and served through the Varnish Enterprise layer, functioning as a private CDN. We had servers closer to user locations from which we served these websites. Before and after implementation, there was a marked difference in the speed of the systems, and the users noticed it as well. There was significant improvement in the user experience.

The best features of Varnish Enterprise include caching performance, which I believe is best in its class and was the main reason we selected it. Varnish Enterprise offers more granular control on the cache and cache control, allowing us to fine-tune the caching behavior and route traffic in a custom way. The cache control and invalidation logic enabled us to purge requests instantly, which was valuable.

Varnish Enterprise has impacted my organization positively by showing marked improvement in the speed at which websites were being served. The clients were happy with that, and the people who owned or created those websites were satisfied. This had a positive impact, as we likely had more revenue as a result.

Varnish Enterprise can be improved, particularly on the security features, as it does not differentiate itself compared to Cloudflare because it only provides the usual TLS termination and load balancing capabilities. If there is an area where it can improve itself, it would be on the security side.

Mutual TLS termination is something I wish was included. I have not used Varnish Enterprise for the last three years, so I cannot confirm whether this feature is now included, but at the time we were using it, we did not see that feature.

I am not using Varnish Enterprise currently, but in my previous organization, I used it for around eighteen months.

I do not recall the exact revenue figures, but the speed improvement was significant. It was at least a forty percent improvement in the speed at which websites loaded, which was great.

We implemented Varnish Enterprise by using the Helm charts that Varnish provides in the backend. It has been around three years since we did this implementation, so the exact details are a bit unclear, but I do remember the impact of it. We evaluated it against other solutions, including Fastly and Cloudflare, and Varnish Enterprise served us well.

I would rate Varnish Enterprise at least eight out of ten.

I chose eight out of ten because the product needs to work on the security part of things. Additionally, while it does give a lot of granular control, it requires a lot of effort to achieve those controls. There was considerable effort from our side to achieve those granular controls on the caching logic, invalidation, and other aspects. If those could be easier to accomplish, I would give it a ten.

Regarding Varnish Enterprise's AI capabilities, I used it three years ago, and there were not many AI capabilities at that point in time, so I cannot comment on this. I did not have any experience with Varnish Enterprise's AI capabilities regarding the accuracy and reliability of output.

Varnish Enterprise is a great product because the core part works very well, achieving speed and cache validation, invalidation, and control logic. If those looking for these particular features, it is a great product. I have not seen the updated product and have not used it in the last couple of years, so I do not have any other thoughts.

My overall rating for Varnish Enterprise is eight out of ten.

My main use case for Varnish Enterprise is to review and check everything. I remember there was a hidden scenario for the cache that I used, and there was a specific one with managing my own workforce. Mainly it was workforce and task related, such as project management.

In my experience, everything about Varnish Enterprise has been quite useful. Varnish Enterprise has positively impacted my organization through performance and efficiency. I am not quite sure about the numbers right now, but I can see the effect and notice that Varnish Enterprise has been very helpful.

I think Varnish Enterprise can be improved from a user experience point of view. User experience with Varnish Enterprise should not have more clicks and should be easy to navigate. The communication through mail can be improved.

We have been using Varnish Enterprise for many days.

Varnish Enterprise is stable and quite reliable.

The scalability of Varnish Enterprise is quite good, and I am even thinking about asking other colleagues to use it.

Varnish Enterprise's customer support is quite good, though the communication through mail can be improved.

I was using a classical approach with workforce work task management.

Varnish Enterprise helps with resources saved, which is more important than time saved.

The setup costs are reasonable and not too costly. They are perfect for my needs.

I checked Varnish Enterprise but did not formally evaluate other solutions.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Varnish Enterprise a seven. Seven is a better rating because improvements are still being requested. Regarding Varnish Enterprise's AI capabilities, I cannot predict accuracy every time, but it will always be based on the scenario. I cannot say it is 100 percent accurate every time; it can be 70 to 80 percent, depending on the scenario only. If you want to save time and effort, you should go for Varnish Enterprise. Varnish Enterprise is quite good. My overall review rating for Varnish Enterprise is seven out of ten.

Varnish Enterprise is primarily used by my organization to cache responses for quick suggestions for users. For example, when users visit IndiaMART and start typing in the search box, we show them a list of suggestions to choose from, which is the module I work on—the suggest module. The request goes through Varnish, and if the request is already present in Varnish, we provide the response back immediately. If it is not there, we proceed to hit the back end servers.

Varnish Enterprise is also used by my organization as a load balancer.

The best features Varnish Enterprise offers are the caching and the load balancing, which are the two main use cases for my organization.

Varnish Enterprise stands out because it can be used to trim down the URL noise, which is really helpful in maintaining a very discreet cache. If users have different parameters but type one letter, they can all be shown the same suggestions regardless of their name or location. This has helped tremendously in cutting down the URL noise and has improved search traceability, aiding in investigating issues.

Varnish Enterprise has positively impacted my organization by significantly reducing the API latency for my personal use case, and the same applies to other teams who use it.

I am not sure how Varnish Enterprise can be improved. I will have to delve deeper into the technicalities that I am not yet familiar with, so this is a question I am not equipped enough to answer.

Since I moved to back end, I have been in regular touch with Varnish Enterprise for around one and a half years. Before that, I had a slight idea about what Varnish was. For hands-on implementation, it has been around one and a half years.

Varnish Enterprise is stable.

Varnish Enterprise's scalability is good, convenient, and reliable.

I have not had the opportunity to connect with customer support for Varnish Enterprise yet.

I have always been using Varnish Enterprise for caching. I did not use a different solution before.

I have not seen a return on investment with Varnish Enterprise.

I do not think I evaluated other options before choosing Varnish Enterprise.

The reduction in latency with Varnish Enterprise has affected business outcomes positively because the conversion rate of search for the suggestions shown to users has been significantly higher than for the search pages they land on by manually typing out the whole query. This is a clear conversion rate and is the KPI we always aim to improve.

My advice for others looking into using Varnish Enterprise is to make sure that it justifies their use case and that it is not an overkill or an underkill for their particular requirement. I would rate this review an eight out of ten.

We are using Varnish Enterprise for reverse proxy and as a secure client. Varnish Enterprise initiates the OIDC for user-protected pages, and we also use it to do the reverse proxy to route the traffic to specific microservices. Varnish Enterprise is mainly for full-page caching, but we are not using it for caching purposes, but as a reverse proxy.

Varnish Enterprise is quick and fast. We are using Varnish Enterprise as a reverse proxy for a customer stack of around 15 million. We have never faced any issue related to the speed of the site or Varnish latency issues. In that way, I would say that it is unique.

Management and flexibility need improvement. I would say that Varnish Enterprise is not flexible. It is rigid and difficult to scale up. The configuration should be made more flexible and scalable along with Kubernetes, because enterprise clients are moving towards Kubernetes. We wanted to scale Varnish Enterprise to be deployed as Kubernetes pods. The configuration should be really flexible. For example, in our use case, we wanted to store some data, and it was very difficult to configure an external database to store as a centralized location. We had a lot of difficulties with that. If configuring an external database would be a much easier setup from Varnish, then it would be a great use case in our scenario, but we faced a lot of issues. We are in a phase of decommissioning Varnish Enterprise and moving towards a new technology.

About the TLS thing, TLS is required even for the open-source as well. They are providing TLS support only for the Enterprise version. My suggestion was to have TLS on the open source, then we don't have to add one more layer of TLS when we are using Varnish open-source version.

User experience-wise, I'm satisfied that Varnish Enterprise is fast, but we were not able to scale up Varnish in an expected way. Varnish Enterprise was growing in a very different direction, and it was growing big and we were not able to control it. We were forced to move out of Varnish Enterprise. The flexibility was not there as we expected. On the other side, the caching part was working fine in Varnish, and unfortunately, I didn't get more chance to work on the caching part of Varnish. But as per my experience, the caching part of Varnish was pretty good, and I would say that it is much better.

I need the TLS support for the open source of Varnish Enterprise. If that is the case, then it would be a game-changer for Varnish.

Improvements need to be on integrating with external databases for storing session details. I heard that there was some integration with Redis, but it was not as expected. The thing was that if it has some integration with external databases for storing from session, it was specifically a use case in our organization where we didn't get such option. We were forced to move out of Varnish Enterprise.

I need work on the scalability part.

I have been using Varnish Enterprise for more than four years.

We were not able to export the metrics, but we were able to export the logs to ELK, and we were able to view the logs over there, but it was a little bit difficult to export the entire Varnish logs into ELK because it was very large and huge in number. The external monitoring tools struggled a lot to digest the Varnish logs. It was easier for us to view the logs and to troubleshoot it, but on an external monitoring platform, we faced a lot of difficulties in ingesting the logs into ELK and external monitoring platforms.

Usually, it will take more than a day or two to get a reply from them, and we used to have email support only. If there is any urgent issue, we send out an email and it will take some time to get the response from the customer support team. My honest suggestion is to improve the customer support.

We switched from Varnish Enterprise to a different solution.

Varnish Enterprise can be used for caching. I am working on a use case for using Varnish as a caching layer on a microservice-based architecture, and I would suggest that one. However, with integration and other things, I won't recommend Varnish. Varnish is good for caching, but for other use cases, especially for our enterprise requirement, Varnish was not the best choice.

Varnish Enterprise is a good product, but with some mild improvement it can be a great product. My overall review rating for this product is six out of ten.

I use Varnish Enterprise as a performance system to handle caching and reduce the first time to load the page.

For example, when we experience a situation where we have just hit an event and are expecting huge traffic to come on our website, Varnish Enterprise helps us handle that traffic because our pages are cached into Varnish, the time to hit the server will be very minimal. Everything will be passed via Varnish pages, and then they will come to server hit pages such as shopping cart, checkout, and everything. That is where Varnish Enterprise helps with performance and load handling.

We mainly use Varnish Enterprise for marketing pages such as home page and PLP, or wherever we are trying to have marketing event-related pages, but there are some drawbacks. For instance, if we want to have a section loaded from the server, there is a loophole where we are not able to do it properly with hole-punching.

With Varnish Enterprise, you can do a couple of things. The integration with Magento or Adobe Commerce works seamlessly, and you can use Varnish Enterprise with Redis or CDN so that it can gather all the load specification properly. Moreover, we can cache VCL based on location, which makes the e-commerce world a bit easier by allowing region-based caching pages for our customers.

Varnish Enterprise has a unique capability where a cost-effective solution can be designed, so we should not increase server specs merely out of fear of high traffic on our website. If you have Varnish Enterprise set up properly, you can handle a large part of the traffic using the Varnish Enterprise layer itself, leading to more advantages than disadvantages.

My expertise lies in e-commerce solutions, and when we explain our use cases to our customers, we clarify the advantages of Varnish Enterprise in performance. They appreciate understanding how Varnish Enterprise can help reduce costs without getting too technical.

When we were not using Varnish Enterprise, we had clients who believed they did not need it because the server load would be lower. However, as an enterprise solution for e-commerce, technicalities necessitate effective handling of page loads. Varnish Enterprise is not just a caching layer; it is a performance layer that enables showing real-time data with proper project architecture without issues.

My suggestion for improvement is that if you could provide guidance on how to do a portion of the page to be server-sided, it would help us greatly. A certain shopping cart cache or more pages could enhance our e-commerce layer. Currently, shopping cart is not entirely dynamic, and even in CMS-related pages, we should have flexibility. We tried hole-punching or having one section free from cache, but it was challenging to configure. Documentation on this would definitely improve our experience.

The configuration can be somewhat rigid as it is quite technical. A newcomer might need to invest a lot of time learning how to set up a Varnish Enterprise layer on any project.

The rating of eight out of ten stems from the complexity of setup, and an easier process along with uncached portions of a page would elevate it to a ten.

I work in e-commerce and have been using Varnish Enterprise for the last 10 years.

Varnish Enterprise is indeed stable.

I rate the scalability of Varnish Enterprise around eight.

Customer support has been good, although I have not used it extensively. We mostly take care of things ourselves, but we receive prompt replies when we do reach out.

When we were not using Varnish Enterprise, we had clients who believed they did not need it because the server load would be lower. However, as an enterprise solution for e-commerce, technicalities necessitate effective handling of page loads. Varnish Enterprise is not just a caching layer; it is a performance layer that enables showing real-time data with proper project architecture without issues.

I have not felt that the pricing, setup cost, or licensing is too high.

We do not have any other business relationship with this vendor, as we are a startup that just started three years ago while trying to expand our client base.

We have seen a return on investment with Varnish Enterprise in terms of reduced server costs because Varnish Enterprise allows us to lower server specs and resources. Additionally, customer experience improves, as they notice that the first byte load time is significantly faster.

I have not felt that the pricing, setup cost, or licensing is too high.

I do not really evaluate other options before choosing Varnish Enterprise; I just assess whether the Varnish Enterprise layer would suffice or if the enterprise level is necessary.

I advise others looking into using Varnish Enterprise not to worry about its complexities but to focus on the advantages it brings to their projects. Understanding and appreciating these benefits will convince them that they should utilize Varnish Enterprise.

If you can improve the documentation for setup or enhance AI capabilities to facilitate faster setups, that would be something worth marketing.

You could be more expressive about how Varnish Enterprise works within projects and include specific scenarios related to e-commerce, rather than keeping the questions too generic. My overall review rating for Varnish Enterprise is eight out of ten.

My main use case for Varnish Enterprise is to serve cached pages for end customers in the e-commerce domain.

Varnish Enterprise serves as the front layer for our website, so whenever any customer visits our website, they consume pages from Varnish Enterprise, specifically static pages such as the home page and listing pages.

The best features that Varnish Enterprise offers are specifically for caching, and I believe the best use case is caching, which helps reduce infrastructure costs and serves pages very fast.

When caching reduces costs and speeds up page inference, it really impacts website performance and user experience. Our vendor has saved a lot of money because of these cached pages, and customer engagement has also increased.

Regarding the features, the primary feature is caching and the management of that cache, where TTL management and related functions are very good.

Varnish Enterprise has impacted my organization positively, as we are getting good clients because our websites are very fast and we are achieving good scores on Google Web Vitals.

I can share that there are not just one website, but a hundred websites where I have worked, and we improved website performance significantly and saved customers money through improvements in load time and Google Web Vitals scores.

Varnish Enterprise can be improved in many ways, such as serving dynamic data as it is currently working only on static data. I would suggest having dynamic data management in parallel with the current static data management.

I have been working in my current field for almost sixteen years.

I would definitely recommend Varnish Enterprise to others looking into using it.

I find this interview very good and do not think anything needs to change for the future.

My review rating for Varnish Enterprise is eight out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

I have been using the solution for more than one and a half years. I am using the latest version of the solution.

The tool is very stable. I haven't seen any issues.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

My main use case for Varnish Enterprise is mostly cache. When I say mostly cache, I mean we get directly into Varnish and we edit the rules with VCL files.

In my opinion, the best features Varnish Enterprise offers are excellent. What makes those features stand out for me is the flexibility and configuration options because we can edit mostly everything about the request and a specific response for a specific request.

Varnish Enterprise has positively impacted my organization because the response time is an upgrade. The improved response time has benefited my organization as the response time for HTTP requests is more efficient and quick.

I think Varnish Enterprise can be improved as the prices can be cheaper. Besides the price, I do not think there is anything else that could be better.

I have been using Varnish Enterprise for about three years.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is difficult as some clients do not want to pay so much.

I do not want to add anything else about the features. The price and the feasibility of implementation keep Varnish Enterprise from being a perfect ten for me. I rate Varnish Enterprise overall as an eight out of ten.