Origin shield technology isn’t new, and many companies already rely on origin shielding to protect their CDNs from overload.

In this week's episode of Two Minute Tech Tuesdays, we're looking at parallel ESI (Edge Side Includes).

Whether you have one CDN or many, an origin shield is a must-have as part of your resilience and risk mitigation strategy. If something goes wrong, the CDN itself can become a DDoS attack on your origin (the whole reason you want origin shielding in the first place!). And, as we’ve learned from recent events that saw half of the internet go offline for 49 minutes, no one can afford to have a single point of failure. 

In this episode we'll be looking at dynamic backends. Dynamic backends in Varnish allow backends to be defined on the fly, instead of being predefined. Basically imagine if instead of connecting varnish to one specific origin server, you enable it to connect to different ones as required, say multiple servers.