Caching the uncacheable in Varnish
summary
Explains how Varnish turns otherwise uncacheable responses into cached assets by using VCL to strip tracking cookies, create hash variants and override TTLs (images cached for a year, default HTML an hour), handling 99% static sites while isolating the 1% stateful bits with ESI placeholders or AJAX. Shows validating HMAC‑SHA256 JWTs and returning synthetic JSON after reading session data from Redis so personalized API responses never hit origin, and previews Sledgehammer wasm for edge logic and strip tracking cookies as a practical rule — Sledgehammer is experimental but the VCL + Redis + JWT techniques are production-ready.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Introduction and welcome
- 1:27Why slow websites lose money
- 3:13The role of caching
- 4:39About Varnish Cache
- 6:45Default caching behavior
- 8:08Varnish Configuration Language
- 9:34Varnish state machine
- 11:00Stripping cookies for caching
- 13:28Using cookies for cache variations
- 15:35Edge Side Includes for stateful content
- 17:39Computing content on the edge
- 18:22Validating JWT tokens
- 21:54Synthetic responses
- 22:58Personalized synthetic responses
- 25:04Edge computing with WebAssembly
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