[falcolas]

Varnish cache is great. Heck, any kind of caching is great. Even a stupidly simple 5 second cache will be sufficient for handling most levels of traffic.

[darsoli]

Ah, Varnish - I have heard so many great things. Not sure why I didn't use it this time around. I think I assumed Cloudfront would take care of it.

My biggest learning was that CDN != caching. While it can be used as such, it's not automatically set up that way out of the box.