Case Study: République et Canton de Genève achieves high performance, resilience and near‑100% availability with Varnish Software

République Et Canton De Genève Used Varnish As Part Of A Major Website Development With Varnish Professional Services Support To Ensure Smooth Integration And Deployment

The Canton of Geneva, the public administration for Geneva, Switzerland, faced a major website overhaul to consolidate roughly 500 departmental sites into a single e‑services portal while supporting a complex IT environment and extremely variable traffic (≈500K monthly visitors, 1.5M pages/month, and thousands of requests/second during peaks). Their priorities were scalability, security, high availability and smoother deployments to avoid visible outages and ensure continuity of citizen services.

They implemented Varnish API and Web Acceleration with Varnish Professional Services (3 Varnish nodes on 3 servers, Hitch for TLS/SSL and VCL for flexible reverse‑proxy rules). A proof of concept was ready in about a week; since launch they report a 97% cache hit rate, website availability never below 99.75% and almost 100% uptime, plus reduced operational overhead by relying on Varnish support and consultants.

République et Canton de Genève

Roberto Lopez

Project Manager