In 'The Odyssey,' Greek poet Homer describes the 'wine-dark sea’. Today we would probably say “dark blue sea”, but at the time Greeks, and other ancient populations, didn’t have a name to describe what we today call “blue”. Blue, though, has always existed.

Okay, so it’s March. Black Friday and holiday shopping aren’t high atop most people’s priority lists right now. But… this is the time of year when businesses are getting their e-commerce operation in order to test its robustness for the arguably expanding holiday shopping season. It’s beginning earlier and earlier every year, and with people shopping on more devices than ever, meeting peak demand becomes more challenging all the time.

As you may know, part of my job consists of helping Varnish users, both customers and community users (join us on IRC!), often looking at their VCL and see if there's anything wrong. And sometimes, there is. After all, VCL is a programming language and mistakes happen. However, one point stands out as being badly understood, and I feel it deserves a short blog post to set the record straight.

Not so long ago and not so far away, the idea of building your own CDN was a complex, remote and expensive proposition, requiring more technical expertise than most companies delivering digital content wanted to commit when there were perfectly reasonable commercial CDN options available.