section.io Website Performance and Security Blog

section.io is pleased to introduce HTML Streaming, a new feature which allows for dramatic improvement of the Time to First Byte and Start Render time without needing to cache the full HTML document. While section.io already gives users the power to cache full HTML documents and provides a Developer PoP for testing before going to production, we understand some websites don’t want to change their source code to allow for the full HTML Document to be cached. That’s where HTML Streaming comes in.

When it comes to page load time, there are two distinct parts that any website manager or developer should consider: The back end load time and the front end load time. Back end load time is important because it is the time a website visitor is waiting before any information from your website is sent to their browser.

Varnish Cache is a popular tool due to how quickly it delivers content from the cache and how flexible it can be. Using Varnish’s domain-specific language, Varnish Configuration Language (VCL), users can cache both static and so-called “dynamic” content, also known as the HTML document.

The ELK Stack, recently rebranded as the Elastic Stack, is a combination of several open-source tools: ElasticSearch, LogStash, and Kibana, that are combined to create a popular log management tool. The ELK Stack is an extremely useful set of tools for developers which has a wide range of uses. The most popular use case of the ELK Stack is getting increased visibility into how applications are working through an advanced log management.

We are pleased to announce today that we have added the Signal Sciences Web Protection Platform to section.io’s modular content delivery grid. Both section.io and Signal Sciences focus on bringing security, agile practices, and DevOps workflows to enterprises that are tackling the shift to cloud and modern application deployment.

section.io is the only content delivery platform specifically designed to accelerate, scale and secure web sites with the development lifecycle in mind. But before we get to why this is so important, you must understand how CDNs came about, what problems they were created to solve, and why they traditionally have stood far apart from the development cycle.

Varnish Cache is a modern, flexible HTTP accelerator that speeds up websites by caching both static and dynamic content. Varnish is an open source tool that can also be deployed on content delivery solutions such as section.io, and it has grown in popularity in the past several years because it is faster and more configurable than older solutions like Nginx and Squid.

section.io’s Developer Point of Presence is the first and only solution that allows developers to pull their full content delivery, caching, and WAF configuration into a local environment for testing. Using MiniKube, a tool which allows you to create a local Kubernetes cluster on your machine, section.io gives developers and operations teams a local Point of Presence that is exactly the same as section.io’s global PoPs. This allows for a faster feedback loop, less problems on your live site, and better website security and performance outcomes.

In the past few years it’s seemed like there has been a new widespread security breach every other week. High profile incidents such as Heartbleed and WannaCry and hacks of notable entities including Sony Pictures and the Democratic National Committee have brought cyber security to the front of people’s minds. The magnitude of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks has risen with the increased number of devices connecting to the internet, and as more of the population engages with these devices the risk of sensitive information being taken advantage of continues to rise.

When using Varnish Cache one of the most important things you need to understand is how and why various requests get labelled as they do. A “cache hit” and “cache miss” are easily understood - a cache hit is a request which is successfully served from the cache, and a cache miss is a request that goes through the cache but finds an empty cache and therefore has to be fetched from the origin.