Case Study: SFR achieves significant CDN cost savings and top-tier performance with Varnish Software

SFR - Customer Case Study

SFR is a major French telecommunications operator (millions of retail and business customers and one of France’s top-ten websites) that faced rising CDN costs and high traffic handling expenses. Using Akamai for content delivery became increasingly expensive, so SFR decided to build an in‑house, Varnish‑based CDN across its national network of POPs to reduce OPEX, regain configuration control, and create a new revenue stream by offering CDN services to customers.

SFR implemented a Varnish DIY CDN using the Varnish Massive Storage Engine, extensive VCL customizations and VMODs, and ongoing support from Varnish core developers to optimize performance. The result: a scalable platform (>20M req/s, >350 Gbps capacity) that eliminated external CDN costs, improved site and video delivery performance, earned top CDN rankings (Cedexis in France), delivered clear ROI, and enabled SFR to sell high‑performance CDN services to external clients; TLS/SSL integration is next.

SFR

Thierry Magnien

SFR