10-year Varnish Cache anniversary Q&A with Varnish CTO Per Buer

Insights from Inside Analysis’s “Caching a wave: Varnish CTO Per Buer Q&A”

As Varnish Cache celebrates its 10-year anniversary, Inside Analysis had a Q&A with Varnish founder and CTO, Per Buer, to discuss how a small open source project with 37 initial beta downloads became a force of nature, with 2.5 million users worldwide in just ten years.

Driven by the dot.com bust and lack of resources to scale a website, Varnish Cache bubbled up as one of few tools to enable large traffic peaks. Since those early days, when vg.no’s Anders Berg, and well-known developer Poul Henning Kamp came together, to create a solution to scale for unpredictable traffic waves, Varnish Cache has grown and changed significantly.

Varnish Cache has grown up - becoming more sophisticated and flexible - as the web and apps have grown and proliferated. Major sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, were using Varnish Cache to scale and never experiencing downtime. Naturally this led to an explosion in usage and recognition.

Eventually this led to the Varnish Cache project becoming big enough for its own company, hence the birth of Varnish Software in 2010. Varnish Cache is still a robust and active open source project with a bustling community. But the demand for web and app scalability and performance has grown exponentially alongside the insatiable hunger for more and more - often dynamic and data-intensive - web content. Varnish Plus, the commercial offering borne of Varnish Cache, came along to address those needs.

To learn more about this history and, even more importantly, to learn what makes Varnish different, how Varnish Cache exists alongside its commercially oriented open source ‘cousin’, the challenges of balancing community and commerce and even Varnish Software’s passion for brewing beer, take a glance at the entire interview with Per.

Photo (c) 2014 Rachel Kramer used under Creative Commons license.