Caching at the Edge: CDNs for everyone

Drupal 8 has comprehensive knowledge about the cacheability of the things it renders. This opens new doors. Did you know Drupal 8 will be able to cache everything at the edge?

For sites with many mobile users (high latency due to network), global audiences (high latency due to distance) and performance-sensitive sites (e-commerce), Drupal 8 will be a huge leap forward.

We’ll be showing how easy and powerful it is using the CloudFlare and Fastly CDNs.

Cache tags

Instantaneous purging of all (and only!) the affected pages when an article is updated. No more manual purging by content editors. No more fiddling with URLs to purge. It all just works. Optimally.

Cache anonymous pages without any effort. On your own reverse proxy, and on many CDNs — thanks to standardized configuration.

This sounds nice, but that’s just the anonymous user case. What about authenticated users?

Cache contexts

The typical example: a shopping site, users categorized in groups according to interests, and a shopping cart.

Automatic caching of the entire page, minus the shopping cart, on the edge. Reused across all users in the same group. And, if the CDN supports it, even the shopping cart can be cached on the edge (and be kept up-to-date thanks to cache tags). Otherwise only thatneeds to talk to the origin (via AJAX, for example).

Cache authenticated pages without any effort.  On your own reverse proxy, and on some CDNs — thanks to standardized configuration.

Goals

• The caching concepts
• Demos
• BigPipe, ESI, hybrid rendering strategies
• A peek at the future: ServiceWorker