[Contributed by Konstantin G.]{class="badge informative" title="Konstantin G."} [PaaS only]{class="badge informative" title="Applies to Adobe Commerce on Cloud projects (Adobe-managed PaaS infrastructure) and on-premises projects only."}
Varnish ESI block
Edge Side Includes (ESI) are special directives that you can use to include web pages in other web pages.
An example:
<div>
  <esi:include src="http://domain.com/index.php/page_cache/block/esi/blocks"/>
</div>
            Varnish fetches content from http://domain.com/index.php/page_cache/block/esi/blocks and replace the <esi> tag with it.
Commerce and Varnish ESI
The Commerce framework creates an ESI tag when the following conditions are met:
- The caching application is set to 
Varnish Cache - A XML layout 
blockelement is added with attlattribute 
Example
cms_index_index.xml:
  <referenceContainer name="content">
      <block class="Magento\Framework\View\Element\Template" template="Magento_Paypal::esi.phtml" ttl="30"/>
   </referenceContainer>
            In the example above, the block element adds content from the esi.phtml template to a homepage and Varnish automatically updates it every 30 seconds.
Limitations
Currently, Varnish does not support ESI over HTTPS so it automatically switches to HTTP.
Magento\PageCache\Observer\ProcessLayoutRenderElement:
    private function _wrapEsi(
        \Magento\Framework\View\Element\AbstractBlock $block,
        \Magento\Framework\View\Layout $layout
    ) {
    ....
        // Varnish does not support ESI over HTTPS must change to HTTP
        $url = substr($url, 0, 5) === 'https' ? 'http' . substr($url, 5) : $url;
        return sprintf('<esi:include src="%s" />', $url);
    }