We’ve reached that time of year when most e-commerce sites are finishing up their efforts to strengthen and secure their website performance before big holiday shopping kicks off in earnest. The frenzy is unpredictable - and no retailer, big or small, is immune. As more shoppers move online for Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, and the shopping season extends to become a season unto itself, there are more unpredictable factors over a longer period of time, meaning that preparation, risk assessment and stress testing are essential. Many different stumbling blocks can get in the way of site performance and, ultimately, of capitalizing on major marketing campaigns you’ve invested in. The bottom line is that you may even alienate customers with your online traffic jam (they went online to avoid the crowds!), keeping them away not only during the holidays but later, too.  

It seems like we’ve been hearing cloud-cloud-cloud for so long already that you’d think we’d be completely saturated by cloud computing by now. And while it has continued its steady growth, there is still capacity for much more. A 2018 IDG study on cloud computing found that while a whopping 73% of companies (and growing) report using at least one of their applications in the cloud, most who are not counted in this number plan to introduce the cloud to their infrastructure within the next year. 

Right now you may invest millions in server hardware to get the capacity you need. The norm is 10Gb per server, and building that out to scale can grow to be not only expensive but more difficult to maintain. Now, with Varnish Streaming Server in Varnish 6.0, you can upgrade your infrastructure to 100Gbit. But what does this mean?

HTTP is an intrinsically textual protocol, with relatively few rules. So it makes sense for Varnish to provide you with one of the best tools available to manipulate text: the regular expression, or "regex" (or "regexp", or "regexp?" if you want to be very clever).