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Enterprise-grade CDN for app, API, and media delivery at global scale
Open-Source Projects
Discover top open-source software, updated regularly with real-world adoption signals.
Discover top open-source software, updated regularly with real-world adoption signals.
Lightning-fast HTTP accelerator for high-traffic web services
Varnish Cache delivers ultra-low latency content delivery by caching HTTP responses, offering a programmable VCL language, multi-threaded performance, and extensive testing for reliable edge acceleration.
Varnish Cache is a high-performance HTTP accelerator designed to cache web content and serve it with minimal latency. It operates as a reverse proxy, intercepting requests and delivering cached responses, which reduces load on origin servers and speeds up user experiences.
The core of Varnish is written in C and leverages a multi-threaded architecture to handle thousands of requests per second. Custom request handling is achieved through VCL (Varnish Configuration Language), allowing fine‑grained control over caching policies, header manipulation, and backend selection. The project includes a comprehensive automated test suite run via CircleCI and the vtest framework, ensuring stability across supported platforms. Varnish can be built from source on Linux/Unix systems and integrated into existing infrastructure, with commercial support available for enterprise deployments.
When teams consider Varnish Cache, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.
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E‑commerce site acceleration
Reduced page load times and lower backend database load during peak sales.
API response caching
Improved latency for frequent API calls while preserving freshness via VCL rules.
News portal edge caching
Fast delivery of static articles and images to global readers.
CDN edge node integration
Efficient caching of static assets, decreasing origin bandwidth consumption.
Varnish is primarily implemented in C.
Use VCL (Varnish Configuration Language) files to define policies, header handling, and backend selection.
TLS termination is not native; it is typically handled by a front‑end proxy such as Nginx or HAProxy.
Commercial support and services are offered through the Varnish HTTP Cache Business page.
Varnish includes the vtest framework for automated testing of VCL scripts.
Project at a glance
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