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ruben_varnishon 20 Years of Varnish: A Cloud-Native Distribution (In-Core TLS, K8s Gateway API)

Author here. To mark 20 years of Varnish Cache, we are releasing a new downstream distribution built for Kubernetes.

Technical Summary:

* In-Core TLS: Termination is handled natively by the engine process. No sidecars required.

* K8s Gateway API: Full implementation. Routing is defined via standard Kubernetes resources. Code here: https://github.com/varnish/gateway

* No VCL: A new Rust routing engine ("Ghost") handles dynamic traffic. VCL is not required for standard routing.

* Observability: Native OpenTelemetry/Prometheus exporters and structured JSON logs.

Home of our downstream distribution: https://varnish.org

ruben_varnishon Deno Under TinyKVM in Varnish

Let us get back to you on that.

Leaning towards making the modules/examples permissive, indeed.

ruben_varnishon Deno Under TinyKVM in Varnish

Imagine having all that being run by Varnish as the data plane?

Do you think the whole MACH stack users would then move their workload to such a controller/ingress/gateway?

I think they wouldn't, because they don't necessarily understand (or need?) the advantages of caching at scale and flexibility that Varnish provides.

But if you say that you will accelerate everything in their K8s cluster... Then maybe ;)

We'll see. I have a wish for Kubecon in Q4

ruben_varnishon Deno Under TinyKVM in Varnish

I do owe you an email reply on that. I haven't forgotten that, just so you know.

But yes, Varnish Cache is not exactly what you would call Cloud Native.

Varnish Software have launched Pro currently on AWS only at a much lower price point, but it is still somewhat limited. I think that a Free-tier providing some of the goodies you mention would also cover much of what's needed for today's workloads including better memory management, in-core TLS and a better developer experience by having much better K8s support. Much of this could and should go into Varnish Cache, but that is a longer road as the project as such has a different focus than we do.

Expect more on that front this year @pbower :)

ruben_varnishon Deno Under TinyKVM in Varnish

TinyKVM is certainly technology that in itself is rather groundbreaking, but it is obviously even more powerful in the context of request handling at lightning speed. But you are right it could be used for other things.

Would you have read this if neither Deno, Varnish or TinyKVM would have been in the title? ;)

But we hear you. Will put a page on our website and should probably consider seeing up a community site as well as it is indeed, grabbing some attention.

ruben_varnishon Deno Under TinyKVM in Varnish

Sorry for not replying. But good to see you got your answer in the end.

Tip, Although not entirely what you asked, but related: what about using more caving in your CI/CD Pipeline. Customers see incredible time savings when using Varnish on that context (mostly with Enterprise w/MSE4 as you will need a massive cache, but it can be useful even with Varnish Cache grounding on your pipeline and workflow). If you are interested, read more here: https://www.varnish-software.com/solutions/data-ai-accelerat...

ruben_varnishon TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish

(not the author, but a friend of friend ;)

Could you specify this a bit? @codethief

The way it's phrased makes it sound like you want to stuff TinyKVM into a container, but I suspect what you are actually asking to implement an OCI runtime with TinyKVM https://github.com/opencontainers/runtime-spec/blob/main/spe...

Does that make more sense?

ruben_varnishon TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish

There's a contradiction in the text, I'll giv eyou that, bu at the end he clearly links both * a Varnish Module using this <https://github.com/varnish/libvmod-tinykvm> * a set of examples in multiple languages <https://github.com/varnish/tinykvm_examples>

ruben_varnishon TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish

Original post: https://fwsgonzo.medium.com/tinykvm-the-fastest-sandbox-564a...

You can find a bunch of posts related to this topic there as well.

ruben_varnishon TinyKVM: Fast sandbox that runs on top of Varnish

No need to wait, you can start playing right away: https://github.com/varnish-rs/varnish-rs

ruben_varnishon Nginx 1.13 released with TLS 1.3 support

https://docs.varnish-software.com/varnish-cache-plus/vmods/g...

That? Works like a charm.

It's available with the on-premise enterprise subscription and on the AWS and Azure clouds as Varnish Plus - Caching Engine:

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=263c020...

https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/app...

https://www.varnish-software.com/pricing/varnish-plus/

ruben_varnishon System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

One of the most well executed marketing stunts ever seen must be the "Powered by Ubuntu Linux" stickers that System76 provided back in the day when your OS was still relevant and people thought Ubuntu would be the next big thing in the desktop/laptop space.

I have personally learned so much from that experience that it is very difficult to overlook when thinking of brand hacks.

ruben_varnishon System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

Every time a friend or colleague asks why I use "that" I simply thrown my laptop to the floor, pick it up and continue working on it.

Then I ask them to try the same with their Apple laptop.

That normally makes them never ask such questions again.

I learned that from an IBM (and later a Lenovo) sales person when presenting the X series. It's designed and built to tolerate real use. And some abuse :-)

ruben_varnishon System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

I have been on the X2XX series for over 10 years, counting 5 laptops.

EVERY single thing has worked with Ubuntu (every single six months release, since 12.04 only used LTS releases) and required little to no effort.

As for a "Desktop" I haven't touched one at work since 2004. TBH I believe only gamers care. And gamers like to build/adapt their own hardware. Unless you can differentiate heavily and have something unique (something like building a RED camera or a super fast Electrical car) how is that going to fly in a marked that is in decline?

Keep yourselves to building a super high end laptop that can rival a Lenovo X series model and we will look into that.

ruben_varnishon Varnish Cache 5.0

The reference to Bump is also on the copyright notice on the license file.

As Lasse pointed out, we never meant to take away any merit from your work. If you feel we could highlight the Hitch's origin from Stud better, let us know how. We are open to suggestions.

And yes, if you ever come to Oslo, you have an open invitation to come by an test our homebrew :)

ruben_varnishon Varnish Cache 5.0

Totally agreed!

I believe that the power and utility of VSL are so underestimated and overlooked that I don't know where to start...

ruben_varnishon Varnish Cache 5.0

Since 3.0 you have VMODs, to counter for the well-founded lack of Inline C support around. These Varnish modules will extend VCL with C, C++ or even Rust libraries on a safer manner: https://varnish-cache.org/vmods/

If you make your own VMOD(can take from a few hours to days), make sure to send a PR and add it to the directory above (IOW: share it) :)

ruben_varnishon Varnish Cache 5.0

Yes, Varnish does h2c so for HTTPS you will need something like 1.4 or later: https://hitch-tls.org/

Made by Varnish Software to provide a "browser-vendor-compliant" HTTP/2 stack.

ruben_varnishon Stud No More. Enter Hitch from Varnish Software

"I recently learned about hitch, from the fine folks at Varnish Software. To the extent my opinion matters anymore on these things, I recommend people use that instead of stud. I'll be pushing a changeset up to the "official" stud repository redirecting people to this project."

You can get it here: https://github.com/varnish/hitch Read more about it here: https://hitch-tls.org/

ruben_varnishon Creepy visitor tracking using Linkedin

Well, same goes for sites using elements from Twitter, Facebook, Google (think of their JS CDN)... For those sites you can use https://disconnect.me/

ruben_varnishon Varnish 4.0.2 released

You can use these:

* Upgrading notes: https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/4.0/whats-new/upgrading.h...

* A script by Fed that will do 70-90% of the job for you: https://github.com/fgsch/varnish3to4

Let us know how it went :-)

ruben_varnishon Varnish 4.0.2 released

I think that the point with Varnish and VCL is that you can adapt it, tailor it and even extend it (the language with additional functionality from external libraries i.e. cURL or memcached) to the point that it fits your system just the way you need it.

Obviously, depending on what you were trying to do and to which extend Varnish was extendable then (VMODs were added in 3.0) it might not have been the best option there is.

Anyway, thank you for your reply. It was a very interesting insight you came with there.

ruben_varnishon Varnish 4.0.2 released

A couple of resources for Varnish 3:

* https://github.com/mattiasgeniar/varnish-3.0-configuration-t... (fairly well maintained with CMS specific VCL examples)

* https://github.com/slashsBin/nuCache (library for different programming languages, not so CMS centric)

Both of these are listed in our utilities directory:

* https://www.varnish-cache.org/utilities

Other Varnish (VCL) extensions can be found in the VMOD directory:

* https://www.varnish-cache.org/vmods

If you have ideas on how to make both these resource more visible and accessible for our users, please let me know.

ruben_varnishon Varnish 4.0.2 released

I think your description might fit if performance and scalability is a non-issue for your site.

Your own caching will make your webapp (or API) scale (say 2x faster or serve 15x the amount of users), but if you need your app to take some serious beating (say 100x to 400x the amount of users with minimal ttfb) because your site/app suddenly becomes flavour of the month on the Internet, then you will really need Varnish.

After seeing several Paywall and API deployments and all sorts of other advanced business logic, such as GeoIP detection or Mobile device classification, applied in the cache layer while keeping a sane and simple VCL, I am not sure your initial point is the case. The normal way to write VCL is to keep it simple.

(Yes, I am biased, but my point is still valid).

ruben_varnishon Varnish 4.0.2 released

Answer to (1): Heroku used Varnish in front of EVERYTHING in their previous stack... So I guess that means that whatever Ruby (or RoR) app you are running you should look into using Varnish.

ruben_varnishon Varnish 4.0.2 released

Next time call me and I will make sure that the best minds doing cache invalidation in the industry have a look and fix your issue.

[Varnish Software sales hat on]

ruben_varnishon Varnish 4.0.2 released

We had one in NYC in May. We might be coming back next year :-)

ruben_varnishon HTTP/2.0 – Please admit defeat

Good one. More context on the ideas and proposal Poul-Henning has put on the table: http://phk.freebsd.dk/words/httpbis.html

ruben_varnishon Varnish 4.0 Released

See, it did not take that long:

https://github.com/fgsch/varnish3to4

ruben_varnishon Varnish 4.0 Released

Thanks for your honesty! We are really interested in understanding how-to create better documentation for users like you. Bear with us :-)

Maybe an updated version of the book (and its examples) [1] would help? Or do you have some other concrete examples

[1] https://www.varnish-software.com/static/book/