This week’s episode is about Grace mode, Varnish’s interpretation of stale-while-revalidate.

This week’s episode is about VCL — the Varnish Configuration Language — which is used to define your own caching policies in Varnish Cache and Varnish Enterprise, and the number one feature in Varnish.

If you've read a few of my blog posts, you probably already know I love the VCL (Varnish Configuration Language) idea, big time. Being able to change the processing logic via code opens a world of possibilities and makes pretty much all other tools feel constrained in their configurations. But...

But, well, VCL is code, and code is scary to a lot of users, and I can understand when you begin with Varnish and only have very limited configuration needs, VCL can feel complicated and some would prefer a simple, declarative language. The good news is that it's totally possible, let's see how we can help!

Duplicative work is never a good idea. Especially not if your job is to ensure that your organization delivers content as fast, efficiently and securely as possible. If you are using Akamai and Varnish in combination for this purpose, your days of being frustrated by the fact that you have to manage your cache in two places (e.g. when changing your cache TTLs and purge settings) are over.