Varnish Cache and its usage in the real world Meet Magento New York 2014 Talk

This talk at Meet Magento New York 2014 is Varnish Cache and its usage in the real world by Ivan Chepurnyi. Varnish is a way to accelerate sites such as Magento websites by caching as much content as possible.

Varnish is controlled by VCL - the Varnish configuration language.

vcl_recv is the entry point for a customer request, and you can detect a customer segment based on cookies and serve a specific type of content for that segment.

vcl_hash builds the cache hash for a page - it gives the possibility to serve different content based on customer device type, detected customer segment, etc.

Secret of successful Magento Varnish integration is in 4 key components: headers, cookies, Javascript and browser storage.

Varnish is all about communication via headers - specify cache TTL from Magento in headers.

Cookies connect dynamic actions, shopping cart, etc., in Magento and Varnish.

Javascript is used to serve dynamic content via AJAX calls.

Browser storage should be used to minimize AJAX calls.

There's a framework that already caches basic pages in Magento, and you can easily add your own page type. Ivan has released the code on GitHub at https://github.com/EcomDev/EcomDev_Varnish