Case Study: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) achieves 30% cost savings and up to 100x faster, highly available content delivery with Varnish Software

CBC Used Varnish Diy Cdn To Reduce Capital And Operating Expenses Over Five Years By 30%

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) operates CBC.ca, the largest website in Canada, serving millions of users daily and requiring 24/7 availability, fast delivery of fresh content and reliable live streaming. Facing soaring traffic peaks, changing consumption patterns and pressure to cut costs, CBC needed a solution to maintain performance and availability during outages and high-demand events without dramatically increasing infrastructure spending.

CBC deployed Varnish Plus (with the Varnish Administration Console) as a caching layer and tuning partner, reducing the number of web-delivery servers to two Varnish servers and cutting Apache backend servers from 12 to 6. The result: roughly 30% lower CAPEX and OPEX over five years, object delivery 10–100x faster, resilient site operation during storage outages (about 95% of the site remained browseable) and seamless handling of extreme peaks (up to ~110,000 concurrent connections), all enabled by a tuned cache strategy and vendor support.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)

Massimo Mollica

Manager