In this action-packed Varnish workshop, the mission is to bridge the gap between code and infrastructure from a web performance point of view. Varnish will be the primary tool to perform HTTP-based caching that will make our sites, applications & webservices bulletproof.
The question is: do we adapt Varnish to our application code base or vice-versa? I won't answer that question, but instead we'll solve the problem by approaching it from both directions. By the end of this workshop, you'll be familiar with Varnish, how it behaves and how you can write VCL to ensure a good hit rate.
Portability, control & developer empowerment is also important when we approach HTTP-caching from an application point of view. In this workshop, I'll also teach you how to write code that is cacheable by leveraging the power of HTTP.
How do we know if our efforts were successful? By using powerful built-in utilities like varnishlog & varnishtop, and by testing our assumptions with varnishtest.
Topics that will be covered:
- Installation & configuration
- Production setups
- How Varnish respects HTTP conventions
- The typical flow of requests and responses within the built-in Finite State Machine
- How to write VCL (Varnish Configuration Language) code
- How to invalidate the cache
- How to monitor requests, responses and the Varnish hit rate
- How to write cacheable applications
- How to fit Varnish into Drupal
