[bkeroack]

Agreed. Varnish is great if you have an existing web application that needs a quick-and-dirty caching layer built in front of it.

Varnish gives you enough configurability to do just about anything, but the end result will be a spaghetti mess of VCL, inline C and possibly custom varnish modules. The more sustainable route is to build your own caching front end, however I think it's a bit unrealistic to assume that all startups have the engineering talent (or time) in-house to implement that sort of thing.

[spacemanmatt]

Wow, this (and parent-post) really colors my understanding about how far one can/should go with Varnish before building something more tailored. Thanks.