SOFTWARE DELIVERY & CI/CD Why are your CI builds still waiting on the network?
Your pipeline shouldn't wait for the internet. Every second a build runner spends pulling a dependency it already pulled is a second your engineers aren't shipping.
Modern software delivery runs at machine speed. Automation loops, auto-scaling runners, and AI agents pull dependencies continuously across hundreds of concurrent builds. The registries behind them weren't designed for this. When Artifactory or Nexus struggles under load, your delivery pipeline waits.
The trend making this worse
CI/CD concurrency is accelerating faster than registry infrastructure can absorb. Three forces are driving it:
AI-assisted development
Commit frequency is rising fast. More commits mean more pipeline triggers, more parallel builds, more dependency pulls — all hitting the same upstream registries simultaneously.
Auto-scaling build infrastructure
Peak load is no longer predictable. A single merge to main can spin up dozens of runners in seconds, each independently requesting the same packages from the same origin.
Multi-ecosystem pipelines
Pulling from Docker, npm, PyPI, Maven, and proprietary registries in the same build multiplies upstream calls per run. Every ecosystem is a potential point of failure.
The result is a delivery infrastructure that becomes less reliable as your engineering team grows.
What slow pipelines actually cost
VP of Engineering
Every hour lost to pipeline latency is an hour not spent shipping features or fixing bugs.
DevOps and SRE lead
A surge of parallel builds during a major release becomes an outage at exactly the moment you can least afford one.
Platform Engineering Director
Delivery SLAs become impossible to guarantee when machine-to-machine traffic can outpace registry capacity at any moment.
Why standard caches don't fix this
Challenge 1
They compromise security boundaries
Generic proxies cache globally without verifying permissions per request, potentially exposing private artifacts to unauthorized users.
Challenge 2
Heavy content bypasses the cache entirely
Registries serve large binaries via 302 storage redirects. Standard proxies follow the pointer and pass it to the client, the actual payload never gets cached, so every build runner fetches it directly from cloud storage.
Challenge 3
Signed URLs drop hit rates
Every storage redirect carries a unique expiring signature token. A conventional cache treats each tokenized URL as a new request, fragmenting the cache map and producing hit rates too low to matter.
Challenge 4
Stale metadata breaks builds
Package metadata changes constantly but registries rarely specify expiration rules. A generic cache that holds onto yesterday's metadata serves yesterday's version: push an image in one pipeline stage, pull it in the next, and the build breaks.
"Varnish is the cornerstone of how we handle scale"
Global streaming service
How Varnish Virtual Registry solves it
Varnish Virtual Registry is a registry-aware caching, routing, and observability layer purpose-built for high-volume software delivery. It sits between your build nodes and your upstream registries, acting as a vendor-neutral buffer that handles the read path at memory speed.
01
Pull once, serve every runner |
The first pull brings an artifact into the cache; every subsequent request from any runner, ecosystem, or team is answered locally. Container layers are keyed by content digest, so a base layer shared by a hundred images is stored once and served to all of them, even across registries. Upstream registries see a fraction of their previous traffic. |
02
Private repositories stay private |
Requests for private artifacts are authorized against the upstream registry before cached content is served, with authorizations cached briefly so repeated pulls don't pay the round trip. Access control is enforced, not bypassed: approved users share one cached copy, and private artifacts are never exposed to unauthorized clients. |
03
Binary payloads are captured at the perimeter |
Storage redirects are resolved server-side. The raw binary bytes are ingested and stored locally, with signature tokens stripped before caching, and served from local cache on every subsequent request, cutting backend traffic by 90% or more. Mutable metadata is revalidated with the origin on every pull, so builds always see the latest version while the heavy content stays local. |
04
One control plane across every ecosystem |
Docker/OCI, npm, PyPI, Maven, Go, Git and Git LFS, Helm, NuGet, Debian, RPM, and more consolidate under a single caching and routing layer. Health probes monitor upstream registries continuously and fail traffic over to mirror remotes when one degrades, and already-cached artifacts keep serving even when every upstream is down. Builds keep running through outages and migrations. |
The numbers
Build concurrency scales. Pipelines stop failing. Engineers stop waiting.
90%+
70%+
40%+
Varnish Virtual Registry
Built for pipelines that can't afford to wait
Virtual Registry is a registry-aware caching, routing, and observability layer engineered for high-volume software delivery pipelines. Vendor-neutral, protocol-aware, and designed to sit transparently in front of your existing infrastructure. No rearchitecting your stack. No changing how your teams work. No waiting on the network.
The same layer pairs with Varnish Artifact Firewall to enforce dependency policy at request time. Accelerate what you trust, block what you don't.
Resources and media
-
How to accelerate GitHub and reduce CI/CD bottlenecks at scale
If you are looking for ways to accelerate GitHub, improve GitHub Actions performance, or reduce CI/CD bottlenecks, the root issue is not simply scale.
-
Why your DevOps pipeline is slower than you think, and how to fix it
You’ve optimized your code. You’ve automated your tests. You’re using the latest CI/CD tools. So why are your builds still slow?
-
How artifact caching and virtual registries can supercharge your CI/CD
Co-hosted by Platform Engineering, this webinar breaks down how smart caching and virtual registries can help teams deliver faster with fewer headaches.
-
The DevOps challenge
With many enterprises now handling petabytes of traffic through their build pipelines each month, these challenges are not just technical inefficiencies; they are critical business risks that threaten profitability, agility, and innovation.
Next steps
Talk to our team to learn more about Varnish Virtual Registry or try it for yourself for free today.
