Kevin Jones, Global Product Specialist at NGINX, Inc.
We all know that performance is a critical factor in the success of applications and websites, but it's not always clear how to improve it. Code quality and infrastructure are of course important, but in many cases, you can vastly improve the end‑user experience of your application by focusing on some very basic application‑delivery techniques. One such technique is implementing and optimizing caching in your application stack.
In his session at NGINX Conf 2018, Kevin introduces the basic principles of content caching and outlines how NGINX caches responses, describing NGINX’s unique management process and how cache metadata is stored on disk. Along the way, Kevin shares techniques for using NGINX's web cache features that can help both novice and advanced users improve performance. He reviews and analyzes all of the available caching directives and parameters, showcases a working example that enables basic caching functionality, and explores various advanced caching implementations from the perspectives of both NGINX configuration and architectural implementation.