I borderline love Varnish cache, but the way the open source and commercial versions have diverged and all the nice features only go into the $10k/yr+ commercial version sucks.
Features like the memory governer [0], because trying to predict how much memory (open-source) Varnish will use is an absolute PITA and a sure-fire way to run out of memory if you're not careful.
My clients can't justify the commercial license costs (as a sibling comment says, CDNs eat Varnish's lunch in that market) and yet what I can do with Varnish and the power it gives me makes it real magic.
It would be nice to see a modern reimplementation of Varnish, open-sourced, but I doubt that would ever happen.
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.
Comments
I borderline love Varnish cache, but the way the open source and commercial versions have diverged and all the nice features only go into the $10k/yr+ commercial version sucks.
Features like the memory governer [0], because trying to predict how much memory (open-source) Varnish will use is an absolute PITA and a sure-fire way to run out of memory if you're not careful.
My clients can't justify the commercial license costs (as a sibling comment says, CDNs eat Varnish's lunch in that market) and yet what I can do with Varnish and the power it gives me makes it real magic.
It would be nice to see a modern reimplementation of Varnish, open-sourced, but I doubt that would ever happen.
0. https://info.varnish-software.com/blog/two-minute-tech-tuesd...
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 :)
Afair Varnish can store cache in files too? I may be messing things here, as I use Nginx like 500 times more often.
If yes, you can store that data with fixed size tmpfs - while on servers with modern NVMe handling 5 Gbyte/sec I would not bother.