Varnish is one of those tools that has a very specific purpose (a highly configurable reverse caching proxy that is crazily fast). Most of the time I don't nee

Varnish is one of those tools that has a very specific purpose (a highly configurable reverse caching proxy that is crazily fast). Most of the time I don't need it - but those places I have had to use it, it's made the difference between working services and failing services. One example of where it made the difference was where we had two commercial systems, let's call them System A and System B. System A was acting as front end for System B, but System A was making so many API calls to System B it was grinding it to a halt. System B's responses would only change when System A made a call to a few specific APIs - so we put Varnish between System A and System B caching the common API responses. We also set it up so that when a request was made to the handful of APIs that would change the other API's for an account, we'd invalidate all the cache entries for that one specific account. Once System A was talking to the Varnish cache the performance of both Systems drastically improved.