Caching the uncacheable: delivering personalized experiences without sacrificing performance

Maintaining ultra-fast speed and web performance at scale all comes down to efficient caching, but when personalization comes into play, caching can be an immense challenge: it’s a tradeoff between caching enough variations of your content and maintaining a good hit rate. Common placeholder techniques, such as AJAX calls and edge-side includes, can help but don’t address the real problem, leaving many holes to be filled. Even worse, these approaches can leave organizations susceptible to much bigger issues, such as website and web application stability and performance problems.

What if there was a way to get to achieve both personalization AND performance using free, open-source caching tools? To do this, organizations must move decision making to the edge. This presentation will provide a first-hand look at how to personalize content at the edge using different techniques in free industry-leading caching solutions like Varnish Cache. The techniques demonstrated will include using HTTP fragments, creating cache variations with cookie values, authenticating data, retrieving session data and transforming personalized content.

In the end, developers will be able to better leverage the caching tools already in their arsenal to deliver highly personalized experiences while maximizing web speeds and ensuring flawless performance at massive scale.