As a Solutions Architect, Web Developer or Performance Engineer, you have many ways to deliver web pages, applications and content over HTTP/S. But as you are aware, the level of complexity exponentially grows as the type of data, data source, clients, and client locations increase while performance, reliability and budget requirements become more stringent. Two of the solutions, both available as open source and commercial software, employed by many to solve these challenges are NGINX and Varnish. There are various resources available that cover the differences, however, many are written from a very specific web serving point of view. This article will briefly define the differences between both solutions then define the 1) underlying architectural approaches and their benefits, 2) ideal characteristics of cache-centric use cases, and 3) the future of cache, content and edge delivery. 

In a previous blog post, we explained the difference between the loading speed of a page and the perceived loading speed in the browser.

As soon as your browser needs to load related resources like CSS files, Javascript files, web fonts and images, the perceived loading speed can decrease.

People who already know and love Varnish have been singing its praises for a long time. But we’ve seen over the course of the years that there are a lot of people who don’t know Varnish - even those who should, and who would definitely benefit from the content delivery performance boosts Varnish offers.

As we launch into the tenth-year anniversary festivities for Varnish Cache, we thought it would be a great time to dig into the history and take a look back at how your favorite web app accelerator started.