5 ms·

So that looks like a stock Varnish 503. I'm pretty sure the magic behind fastly is a ton of Varnish cache. What's interesting (VCL can be unforgiving), also tha

So that looks like a stock Varnish 503. I'm pretty sure the magic behind fastly is a ton of Varnish cache. What's interesting (VCL can be unforgiving), also that it was a big central stuff up. Which makes me think they have layers and layers of caching in depth and some top level config just blacked out everything. I kind of would have thought they'd have lots of small instances.

res0nat0r 5y ago
Fastly is indeed powered by a lot of Varnish magic. My company used(s) them for the CDN for some of our large website frontends, and they have engineers which will help generate the insanely convoluted and large VCL templates which can be setup in your account and will handle all of the magic routing / caching / much more complex things you need for your origin.
- gonzo41 5y ago
  Yeah I've used varnish before. I like it a lot, but I do think coloring inside the lines as much as possible is probably the safest thing. Some of the VMOD's and more exciting things you can do with varnish become really trick to manage.
transitorykris 5y ago
This is not true Edit: trying to reverse engineer the “magic”, architecture, and the failure from a varnish error message is folly, and misleads others. How do I know the comment is patently false? I ran those teams at Fastly for 3 years.
- ntauthority 5y ago
  Alternately, document your 'magic architecture' in public so that people don't have to offend you or other employees of the firm by making incorrect assumptions based on the little you do show in public. Also helps others pick up if you do go out of business or end up acquired, and before you do it even leads to a more level playing field. However I guess a level playing field wouldn't have given you a NYSE listing... so I guess you're just being selfish?
cbsks 5y ago
> So that looks like a stock Varnish 503 Looks like it, except that Varnish has it spelled “Guru Meditation”, not “Guru Mediation”. Anyone know why that would be? https://github.com/varnishcache/varnish-cache/search?q=meditation+&type= https://github.com/varnishcache/varnish-cache/search?q=medit...
- herpderperator 5y ago
  Try searching an older branch manually. GitHub only searches the main branch.
- donavanm 5y ago
  You've found a kind "trap street". This disambiguates the error message generated from Fastly vs the error message generated from an origin which happens to use varnish as well. Edit: As to why Fastly wants to expose the relatively stock error message instead of custom text, I dont know. My guess would be Faslty (or their customers) have tooling built around parsing the http response and they're preserving compatibility.
- miyuru 5y ago
  this question was already answered in the fastly outage thread. It was to identify fastly's Varnish vs customer's Varnish. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27433139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27433139
- dormando 5y ago
  https://twitter.com/dormando/status/1402466173778677764 https://twitter.com/dormando/status/1402466173778677764 my fault. I would sometimes monitor for "guru mediations" popping up to tell if we were throwing errors without it being caught by other systems. Among other reasons.
gowld 5y ago
Most outages are config errors. Code errors would be detected before they broke everything.

res0nat0r 5y ago

Fastly is indeed powered by a lot of Varnish magic. My company used(s) them for the CDN for some of our large website frontends, and they have engineers which will help generate the insanely convoluted and large VCL templates which can be setup in your account and will handle all of the magic routing / caching / much more complex things you need for your origin.

gonzo41 5y ago
Yeah I've used varnish before. I like it a lot, but I do think coloring inside the lines as much as possible is probably the safest thing. Some of the VMOD's and more exciting things you can do with varnish become really trick to manage.

transitorykris 5y ago

This is not true Edit: trying to reverse engineer the “magic”, architecture, and the failure from a varnish error message is folly, and misleads others. How do I know the comment is patently false? I ran those teams at Fastly for 3 years.

ntauthority 5y ago
Alternately, document your 'magic architecture' in public so that people don't have to offend you or other employees of the firm by making incorrect assumptions based on the little you do show in public. Also helps others pick up if you do go out of business or end up acquired, and before you do it even leads to a more level playing field. However I guess a level playing field wouldn't have given you a NYSE listing... so I guess you're just being selfish?

cbsks 5y ago

> So that looks like a stock Varnish 503 Looks like it, except that Varnish has it spelled “Guru Meditation”, not “Guru Mediation”. Anyone know why that would be? https://github.com/varnishcache/varnish-cache/search?q=meditation+&type= https://github.com/varnishcache/varnish-cache/search?q=medit...

herpderperator 5y ago
Try searching an older branch manually. GitHub only searches the main branch.
donavanm 5y ago
You've found a kind "trap street". This disambiguates the error message generated from Fastly vs the error message generated from an origin which happens to use varnish as well. Edit: As to why Fastly wants to expose the relatively stock error message instead of custom text, I dont know. My guess would be Faslty (or their customers) have tooling built around parsing the http response and they're preserving compatibility.
miyuru 5y ago
this question was already answered in the fastly outage thread. It was to identify fastly's Varnish vs customer's Varnish. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27433139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27433139
dormando 5y ago
https://twitter.com/dormando/status/1402466173778677764 https://twitter.com/dormando/status/1402466173778677764 my fault. I would sometimes monitor for "guru mediations" popping up to tell if we were throwing errors without it being caught by other systems. Among other reasons.

gowld 5y ago

Most outages are config errors. Code errors would be detected before they broke everything.