Changing frontend cache
- by Utsav
Our architecture consists of a front-end cache that most read only users obtain their data from directly. The front-end cache sits in front of a farm of webservers that serve pages written in PHP. We need to be able to detect certain conditions at the front-end cache level and pass those values through to the back-end via HTTP headers. For example we would like to manually tag the carrier network based on the IP address. So, for incoming traffic if the user is say coming from an IP address in the range of "41.202.192.0"/19 we would tag them as being a Orange Cameroon user by setting the appropriate HTTP request header, e.g., X-Carrier = "Orange Cameroon".
Based on the setting of this header we would like to vary the cache and serve a different banner to the end user. How would you go about doing this? Keep in mind that we don't want to pollute the cache and we also don't want to create too many small cache segments.
Assumptions: You can assume that the X-Carrier has already been detected in our cache. So, for the purposes of your test you can just set this value manually in your example script.
