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.

We at Varnish Software are pretty keen on new technologies, experimentation and the sense of learning in and from a community (Varnish Cache, after all, is open source and has a thriving community supporting it). The bigger the community, the more there is to learn and be inspired by.

If your content ever changes you’ll need some way to make sure the updated content reaches the users. The traditional way of doing this is to devise some sort of cache invalidation. You’ll hook it into your CMS and when content changes a HTTP PURGE or REFRESH call goes out to the Varnish Cache servers and the stale content is discarded. This is all pretty nice. There is one problem: if you should ever lose a PURGE request then your content will stay stale for as long as your TTL allows. You have a few options: