Varnish Award for Value creation goes to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)

Continuing our year of celebrating a decade of Varnish Cache, we invited our users to submit their best, most creative use cases to us. Not just so we could sit in awe of the many ways users have flexed their creative muscles and VCL skills to put the famous Varnish flexibility to work. No, we also wanted to reward the way in which companies are building their own valuable Varnish-based solutions and reaping business benefits and recognize the very best of these use cases.

Varnish Cache is generally lauded and loved for its flexibility. It is admired and used for how its creative implementations often lead to significant web performance and scalability gains. What perhaps is not as transparent is how much real value this adds to organizations in time and resources saved, in possible cost savings and reductions and in the more difficult-to-calculate costs of reliability and on-time, on-demand content delivery and customer experience. This is why, in addition to the Varnish Award for Innovation, which was awarded to the Financial Times, we also wanted the Varnish Awards to reflect the real value that Varnish has brought to an organization. 

And the winner of the value category is...

There were many impressive Varnish stories, but by far the most impressive was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's, best known as CBC.

The CBC is Canada’s public broadcaster, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that all of Canada turns to and depends on CBC, meaning that the stakes for 24/7 availability and uptime, along with seamless content delivery and updates, are high. And CBC delivers.

Like most major media outlets, CBC has faced the technical challenges and growing pains that come with scaling up for growing audiences. This is particularly daunting when faced with, for example, broadcasting and streaming major live events that will cause massive traffic spikes and potential downtime.

Where CBC made Varnish Plus shine is in cases in which they experienced a couple of brief server outages but were nevertheless able to continue delivering a 95% functional website. Varnish Plus has helped CBC secure performance and reliability gains, which of course has an immense value in and of itself. CBC, though, has also really demonstrated the bottom-line value they get from Varnish, reducing both CAPEX and OPEX by 30% over five years and reducing the number of servers required to run smoothly and without interruption.

Take a look at the full CBC success story.

Join us in LA!

We are honored to be able to recognize the CBC with the Varnish Award for Value and offer our congratulations and thanks to its team of developers!

We look forward to learning more from CBC at the Varnish Award ceremony in September. The winners in each category will share their stories on September 22 at the Varnish Summit in Los Angeles, and we can't wait to hear them. We hope you are equally excited, and welcome you to register to join us there!

Photo (c) 2008 Andrew Lane used under Creative Commons license.