They mentioned that S3 is too slow for customers, so they serve the data from their app and cache it. Later they mentioned the site is slow for non-US users and they are looking at a CDN for their static assets.<p>I wonder, have they looked at Cloudfront, which would solve both of these problems for them?
99Designs seems to be almost entirely dynamic and likely changing all the time. Why is there a need for so many varnish servers? Why did you go with (slower) Varnish over nginx or gwan? There seems like alot of infrastructure in place for the traffic levels.<p>I only ask because we run nginx as a cache and the vast majority of our content is served directly from it ( almost 80% of page loads are served via cache ) and a single nginx process handles everything for us.