Vanish - Backend servers

Backend servers

Varnish backends are application servers. If you are familiar with CDN platforms, you might know these as ‘origins’ that hosue the content to be delivered, and are defined by IP address and port. Varnish uses backends to get the content you want to display.

You can’t use DNS names to declare a backend in Varnish. You MUST use an IP address and not a domain name. Using DNS entries causes Varnish to fail on start. Varnish lacks the facility to do DNS lookups.

Varnish doesn’t play well with proxies, or at least this was my experience. You may have ‘fun’ while developing inside corporate environments, or it might just work smoothly for you.

An example backend declaration:

backend s_default {
    .host = "10.1.1.1";
    .port = "80";
}

There are other options when setting up a backend for timeouts and other parameters. Notice how I’ve named this ‘s_default’ so that I can use any code that works with this server definition which my unit tests.

If you have multiple backends declared, you can add logic into vcl_recv to change which server is used for the backend request.

# Default backend is set to server1
set req.backend = s_server1;
 
if (req.http.host == "antonyh.co.uk") {
    set req.backend = s_server2;
}
 
if (req.http.host == "www.hutchisontechnical.co.uk") {
    set req.backend = s_server3;
}

Varnish will throw a nasty error and not run if you have declared a backend but it’s not used, or if you try to use a backend that doesn’t exist. As usual with Varnish, it’s very clear on the problem with the configuration.