Akamai & Varnish delivered maximum origin offload for CBC

The Akamai Connector for Varnish, or the components that led to its development, has already been tested on real-life turf. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was gearing up to handle the additional swells of traffic associated with the 2014 FIFA World Cup, they were able to work with Akamai and Varnish to synchronize their Varnish cache at origin with the Akamai cache infrastructure. Once synchronization was achieved, page load speed improved markedly, loading at least 25% faster. Obviously this translated into improved user experiences.

The CBC saw a huge improvement in origin throughput, with far less traffic traveling back to origin. The coordinated power of Varnish and Akamai ensured that the offload at origin was maintained, and that this offload was felt even closer to the edge - even closer to the user experience.

Formalizing the Varnish-Akamai benefit

The experience of helping CBC achieve these results led to thinking about how this could be translated into delivering similar experiences to other customers and users on a much larger scale. Many Akamai and Varnish users would ideally be able to optimize multiple cache layers but have run into the kinds of challenges we want to solve, such as having to duplicate the effort in ensuring that logic and policy is constantly maintained in both Varnish and Akamai. Too much time and resources would go into ensuring that these were constantly coordinated and deployed. But what if, as CBC experienced, these layers could be automatically coordinated to synchronize?

It would:

• Eliminate the need to duplicate logic in VCL and Akamai
• Synchronize the Varnish and Akamai workflows, e.g. cache or key purges
• Harmonize Akamai best practices, e.g. “don’t close persistent connections”, to eliminate often-neglected consistency

And that’s what the Akamai Connector for Varnish does: it helps you amplify the work you are doing with your Varnish layer, reducing duplication of effort while securing consistency across layers while adding efficiency at origin and the edge.

The Akamai Connector for Varnish benefits:

• Simplified daily operations
• Control of Akamai cache configuration using VCL
• Management of application lifecycle changes at origin
• Automatic application of Akamai best practices

Are you ready to secure the same kinds of results CBC saw by synchronizing their Varnish and Akamai implementations? Request access to the Akamai Connector for Varnish and experience these benefits for yourself.