As a Solutions Architect, Web Developer or Performance Engineer, you have many ways to deliver web pages, applications and content over HTTP/S. But as you are aware, the level of complexity exponentially grows as the type of data, data source, clients, and client locations increase while performance, reliability and budget requirements become more stringent. Two of the solutions, both available as open source and commercial software, employed by many to solve these challenges are NGINX and Varnish. There are various resources available that cover the differences, however, many are written from a very specific web serving point of view. This article will briefly define the differences between both solutions then define the 1) underlying architectural approaches and their benefits, 2) ideal characteristics of cache-centric use cases, and 3) the future of cache, content and edge delivery. 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are six months away. However distant this may seem, wheels  across the entire e-commerce industry have begun to turn, shifting their focus from projections and forecasts to tactical decisions on how to improve operations within budget.

With this in mind, here are a few things you can do right now to get ready for this year.

Quality content drives valuable action. Whether that action is a download, install, view, subscription or purchase, quality content is the compelling reason to act. Content can mean a document, an image, audio, video, software or just about anything that can be digitally delivered. But it’s not just the content itself that affects the end user’s perception of quality. The way digital content is aggregated, displayed, recommended, transacted and delivered plays a critical role.