The whole point of HTTP is to be architected such that intermediate proxies such as Varnish are transparent accelerators. “I just feel it’s overused.” — e.g. Y

The whole point of HTTP is to be architected such that intermediate proxies such as Varnish are transparent accelerators. “I just feel it’s overused.” — e.g. You wanted to use nginx and Redis, and needed to justify away from the simple solution. It should be a smell that instead of doing full-page caching in Varnish, you’ve instead rolled your own full-page application layer caching. Varnish handles POSTs, it handles logins (configured via VCL). This solution is a hack. I applaud your performance, but it’s rather nonsensical. Furthermore, memcached is not difficult to run — it’s a single daemon that requires less setup than Redis! And no persistent storage. Final note: “Redis is an open source flat file database server – meaning it’s an optimized key value store for your system.” — this is somewhat nonsense. Redis is a fast datastructure-oriented KV store that happens to be able to persist state to disk, but is by no means a ‘flat file database server’ and I’m not sure how that implies that it’s an optimized KV store.