New Version of Varnish Enterprise Caching Software Released

Caching technology provider Varnish Software has released a new version of its flagship caching software, Varnish Enterprise. Their latest release has been enhanced with new capabilities and optimizations that would make it easier to construct complicated edge logic and succeed in multi-tenant setups.

Varnish Enterprise is Varnish Software’s commercial software, created for enterprise content providers and network operators with features tailored at specific business demands. It was spun off of the open-source Varnish Cache project in 2010.

In the new release, Varnish Enterprise’s capabilities as a platform for constructing customized content delivery services are being expanded with flexible, hardware-agnostic caching and edge computing technologies.

CDNs, Multiple Domains on a Server

Varnish Enterprise 6.0.8r2 includes additional Varnish modules, or VMODs, that would enhance the software’s fundamental functionality. A metrics collection VMOD (named accounting) is included in this release, making it “simple” to gather data in multi-tenant environments. For example, if an organization has a single CDN but each department has its own tenant, or if a web service has several domains hosted on one server.

Video providers that divide their workloads between live, VoD, and live channel statistics will be able to look at data from each tenant independently.

Load Balancing, Cloud Services

Photo Espen Braastad, VP Engineering, Varnish Software
“In this release, we’re adding tools that help developers build edge logic on top of the Varnish platform,” said Espen Braastad, VP Engineering, Varnish Software.

Other VMODs include more capability for dynamic load balancing, handling Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), and altering health probes, with advantages for routing across several nodes and leveraging dynamic backends like cloud services. Another significant new feature is Transit Buffer, which reduces memory usage while providing huge items such as ISO files.

“We consistently enhance our software to provide the features our customers need in the increasingly competitive content distribution landscape that they work in,” said Espen Braastad, VP Engineering, Varnish Software. “In this release, we’re adding tools that help developers build edge logic on top of the Varnish platform, so they can deliver enhanced experiences right from the edge of their networks, and control their content delivery in a more tailored way. Creating new functionality for multi-tenant environments is also in line with the growing popularity of cloud-based architectures, and continues our belief that Varnish Enterprise should work everywhere, and thrive in every deployment.”