Section Blog - Empowering Developers at the Edge

We’re pleased to release Varnish Cache 101: A Technical Guide to Getting Started with Varnish Cache and VCL. Varnish Cache is a powerful HTTP accelerator that is popular due to its speed and flexibility, as it allows users to cache both static and dynamic content, resulting in extremely fast page load times. However, it can be difficult for new users to learn how Varnish Cache works and Varnish Cache Configuration Language.

There are several challenges to deploying a robust security solution on your website or application. As we have discussed previously, hackers, bots, and attack types are becoming more and more advanced, and it can be difficult to block all known and unknown threats using older rules-based Web Application Firewalls. In addition website security solutions can be frustrating to integrate with modern developer workflows such as DevOps and Agile.

The Chrome Developer Tools are a set of debugging tools built right into Google’s Chrome browser that show developers how the browser is interacting with their website or application. Anyone can use the DevTools to see how a particular website is built, where it content is being served from, how quickly the page is loading, and much more. These tools are extremely useful for those assessing the performance of their website or troubleshooting certain aspects of the page load.

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 Cache’s domain-specific language, Varnish Cache 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 Edge PaaS. 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 Cache 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.