Varnish VCL instrumental in Pinterest’s management of 50 billion pins per month

A recent piece in The New Stack shone a light on some of our favorite topics here at Varnish:

1. Varnish (of course) and the ultra-flexible Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) - it is really what makes Varnish the so-called “Swiss army knife of HTTP”, letting companies invent new ways to use Varnish to meet their needs
2. Pinterest - because who doesn’t love Pinterest?
3. Pinterest’s use of Varnish and VCL to enable the massive scale of its “pin” and “board” operation. And when we say “massive”, we’re not joking:

“Pinterest is working at massive scale, with 100 million active users, 50+ billion pins across 1 billion boards every month. The service processes 180,000 requests per second through the Varnish CDN mostly non-cache hits, representing over 10 million unique user actions per minute”

The article starts out by asking a question, with some incredulity, that many people might wonder about themselves: why VCL - and yet another domain specific language? Most people probably don’t relish the idea of learning yet another language. But when users discover the beauty, simplicity, ease of use and, most importantly, the ability to have complete control in defining their own rules, most do not complain.

Pinterest has put VCL to industrious use, ensuring resiliency and scalability using VCL programming. It’s been worth the effort of taking on another language.

To discover more detail how Pinterest has put VCL to work for “amazing monthly uptime” and reliability, take a peek at the full article. 

To learn more about what Varnish can do for you, take a look at our webinar, Caching with Varnish: Step-by-step.

Photo (c) 2012 Joel Kramer used under Creative Commons license.