Content delivery networks (CDNs) can be much more than just the workhorse of content delivery. Sure, that’s what they are designed for, but you can get much more from them if you’re able to extend their functionality -- everything from being able to create separate ‘tenants’ in your own CDN setup (for internal use or to sell CDN services on to external customers) to building in web application firewalls, cache replication, and load balancing functions, and much more.

How can you tell whether bots visiting your website actually are who they say they are? Are they bad bots with malicious intent or are they good bots crawling your site to index your content properly? It’s a given that if you want your content to appear in search results, you have to let search engines do the automated work of indexing it. Which means, of course, opening the door (including premium content behind a paywall) to different search engines’ web crawlers for indexing. 

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.