For many years content owners, ISPs and other companies with content to deliver or stream have put their trust in large global CDN providers like Akamai. With name recognition and stability on their side, this made sense. But content delivery (and content itself) has grown more localized, and CDN technology has changed to allow anyone to build a CDN to suit their content delivery needs.

The first thing that struck me after starting at Varnish Software earlier this year was that the whole organization, from top to bottom, is customer obsessed. And when I say 'customer obsessed' don’t take it as a cringeworthy term you might see as a token gesture in a company's mission statement. I mean they are literally customer obsessed! From our CEO, to our R&D/developers/support agents/engineers (I include all of these roles together, as some of my colleagues do all of them at the same time!), the intricate knowledge of our customer base, the strength of the relationships, and the desire to support them is unique and impressive.

This blog post is “best of” covering our biggest news and most popular content from the last twelve months. It’s been a tumultuous year, to say the least, but we have continued innovating and supporting our customers in all their content delivery goals the best we can. What follows is some highlights of our year, and a summary of the useful talks and research reports we’ve been part of.

Unlike previous years, Amazon Prime Day 2020 didn’t see any major technical glitches or outages. Apart from occasional page load timeouts and slow performance at peak times, the online shopping experience was reportedly smooth. More generally across the e-commerce sector, trends emerged to show and counter the influence of Amazon Prime Day: non-Amazon e-commerce sites offering promotions during Prime Day saw up to four-times-higher traffic than normal compared with sites that offered no promotions, and comparison shopping became the norm rather than the exception.