Autodesk's knowledge web site provides fast, targeted, and faceted access to millions of knowledge artifacts in a multitude of languages. The architecture includes an Acquia hosted Drupal site, a Solr cloud with millions of artifacts aggregated from a dozen sources, GATE, and Varnish and Akamai caches for off loading and scaling.

The site launched in February 2014 and received a million page views in its first three days. Developing and managing the caching strategy has taught us how to effectively use Varnish and Akamai caches. It is not as simple as just enabling the Akamai and Varnish or Acquia Purge modules, and there are trade-offs which need to be considered.

In this session I will discuss our experiences managing Varnish and Akamai caches, for a large Drupal site, and the lessons we have learned.