Our mission: Build a Web site that can deliver emergency information to the population of a large university in the event of a major IT outage. Respond with an emergency message not only at the school's main domain name, but at any other supported domain name, with the right HTTP status so search engines don't index the emergency message in place of real content. No problem, we have Drupal and Varnish in our toolbox.

Ah, but it should also handle SSL, and Varnish doesn't do SSL.
So, we need bratwurst -- a Varnish-flavored bratwurst on an Apache bun!

In this case study of how we built our emergency web presence, we'll cover:

• using Varnish to make the site fast and flexible, and able to deal with multiple domains and URL's for the same content, and 503 statuse where appropriate.
• combining Apache and Varnish into a tasty bratwurst that handles SSL requests
• using JMeter for performance testing
• using Puppet to deploy the site and manage configuration (Varnish, Apache, packages, cronjobs, etc)
• using Features to manage and roll out Drupal changes
• avoiding pitfalls and gotchas (whitescreens triggered by browser specific caching behaviors, running out of TCP connections, oh my)