Varnish for Internal IT Processes

Accelerate Your Internal IT Processes

Your IT team is the lifeblood of your company, and their ability to efficiently manage your infrastructure depends entirely on the level of support you provide. The best way to do that is to always make sure they have the right tool for the job. Let’s take a look at how Varnish can help accelerate your IT processes, streamlining your team’s workload, cutting unnecessary costs, and maximizing the performance of your internal systems.

Breaking free of “Internal vs. External”

Varnish is often deployed for web acceleration, streaming delivery, and private CDN needs. That’s because these are use cases that make speed their utmost priority, and Varnish is an incredibly powerful application accelerator. It’s very normal to focus on these customer-facing needs at the expense of supporting and modernizing your internal systems. After all, it’s the customers that drive revenue.

But that’s the equivalent of building a beautiful house on shaky foundations. It doesn’t matter how nice your outward facing presence is, if the internal systems holding it up are on the brink of collapse.

As a powerful and flexible HTTP reverse proxy, Varnish can cache and accelerate the delivery of answers to GraphQL queries. Plus, using a few Varnish Modules (VMODs) it’s easy to integrate key features such as cache invalidation and persistence into your GraphQL caching setup.

The truth is the IT workflows and DevOps challenges of enterprise level companies need scalable solutions of the same caliber as those used to drive consumer engagement. When you look at the challenges IT faces, there’s a big overlap with those faced by websites and streaming services.

• High latency from mismanaged traffic loads
• Frequent and long-lasting bottlenecks
• Revenue risks from losses in productivity

In large organizations, hundreds or even thousands of engineers could be accessing the same internally utilized services simultaneously, all pulling the same data. This demand causes bottlenecks, performance losses, and delays in DevOps workflows. The result? Increased complexity, missed deadlines, and added costs.

The Varnish Solution

Varnish Enterprise is built from the ground up to improve performance and reduce the operational toil caused by high demand. It delivers much better performance for internal web and API processes, in terms of both latency and throughput, while demanding less from existing hardware. It’s not unusual for Varnish Enterprise deployments to unlock 80% latency reductions, 10x throughput improvements and 90% increase in cache hits.

Plugged into your internal system, it’s a significant boost in speed to your team. And that increase in efficiency kicks in from day one, because the software is designed for ease of deployment and ease of use. Varnish Enterprise plugs seamlessly into existing processes and architectures, no matter how complex the environment or the mix of legacy and modern systems. Once deployed, it is the definition of “set and forget,” but it also brings a modular approach and edge logic environment that lets you evolve your Varnish usage in line with changing business goals.

Here’s what Varnish Enterprise brings to your IT Ops:

• Reduced friction between core systems and different teams
• Improved productivity by reducing the time it takes to access critical data
• Support for emerging business needs while working with legacy infrastructure
• Increased agility and operational efficiency with more streamlined data sharing
• Low latency connections between backend systems
• Control over costs by caching data locally instead of drawing it from public CDNs
• Unlocked data from core systems such as ERP, billing, and proprietary databases 
• Options to break down data silos to create a 360-degree view of business activities
• Data more available to its audience e.g. internal portals for customer data

How does it do all this? Because every aspect of Varnish Enterprise that has made it so effective for accelerating streaming and content delivery, can be leveraged just as easily in the service of optimizing internal IT processes:

• Performance. Varnish can respond to requests in under a millisecond and easily handle hundreds of thousands of requests per second

• Platform agnostic. Deploy on premises, in the public or private cloud, or in hybrid approach, while seamlessly syncing with public CDNs

• Modular approach. 45+ pluggable modules offer fine-grain customization options to add additional functionality as needed.

• Logic execution. A runtime environment executes caching logic in real-time

• Content revalidation. With a range of cache invalidation tools, Varnish makes it easy to keep caches up to date, and avoid content staleness

• Scalability. Handles traffic spikes to maintain performance during demand
  
  
• Efficiency. Scale down infrastructure because Varnish does more work for less
  
  
• Security. Full security suite inc. TLS, mTLS, rate limiting, access controls, and encryption

Summary

Varnish’s powerful caching and application acceleration capabilities are well known. What may be more of a surprise is how legitimately useful Varnish can be when applied to the internal side of your enterprise’s network, automating your business, removing bottlenecks, and boosting productivity, not just in your IT department, but rippling out through your entire company.

Ready to take the next step in integrating Varnish Enterprise into your IT workflow? Talk to one of our team of experts today to get started.