Varnish 3.0 Release Party!
Today we publicly unveil the community website for the Varnish 3.0 Release Party. This was a true community effort and to preempt people who will point fingers at me saying I'm the guy who did it: Let me tell you how this came to be.
I'm active in the Drupal community and helped to create some buzz around the Drupal 7 launch earlier this year. For that two people who I happen to know from Dutch Drupal meetups and european Drupalcons, Roy Scholten en Baris Wanschers designed and built the awesome Drupal 7 Release Party website. It was a big succes and over 300 parties were planned all over the world, including one in my hometown, were both Roy and Baris were present too.
At the job we use Varnish Cache, an awesome piece open source software that makes many of our customers sites very fast and efficient. Then just under 2 weeks ago I spotted this message by Rubén Romero on the Varnish mailinglist asking people to think about organizing a party, somewhere mid juni to celebrate the release of the next milestone 3.0 release of the Varnish Cache software. The idea struck me immediately.
I know the Drupal and Varnish community overlap not just within me. The presentation of Varnish architect and main developer Poul-Henning Kamp at Drupalcon Copenhagen last year was well attended and received and Drupal is used on the Varnish website and Varnish Software AB and Acquia, companies that provide support for Varnish Cache and Drupal respectively have a strategic partnership. This should be doable I thought. And it was... Over the next few days I passed along some emails to Roy, Baris and Rubén. Baris provided me with a stripped copy of the original site and over the course of last weekend I re sculpted the original to fit to the needs of the Varnish 3.0 party people. Earlier this week we got the pledge to host the site and Rubén mobilsed the hard working people on the Varnish side to get the DNS settings right and provide us with great artwork.
The site is built on top of PressFlow, a version of Drupal 6 that is better suited to work with reverse proxy servers like Varnish. It uses OpenLayers to display all the events on geographical maps, has OpenID and Twitter integration and should soon have Flickr functionality. It's hosted on a dedicated VMWare virtual machine running RedHat Enterprise Linux with Apache, MySql, and PHP with APC. And off course it's served through Varnish Cache. A fully load balanced, redundant Varnish Cache platform with a lot of bandwidth to spare.
The result is a fully functional website in just a few days of volunteer work. This would however not have been possible without the work of the Drupal community who built the awesome software that made this site, the incredible work of Ronald, Roy and Baris who built the maternal site, the energy of Rubén and the awesomeness of Varnish 3.0 that inspired me to do this and good things it will bring to the internet and my day to day job.
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