Deno Under TinyKVM in Varnish

Nowadays I almost have zero intersection with Varnish - my own impression it was much more popular like 10 years ago or even more.

I know couple of frameworks/systems support it, especially in php world.

Looks like that it's lost in layers - dev guys don't care much, sysadmins are sort of extincted, noone to bother to add Varnish into request processing queue. Needless to say, people ok HN even complain on Nginx configs,while for base caching it's much simpler, from my perspective.

Varnish is amazing. Nowadays people blow up projects with kubernetes, JS frameworks, million other tools, while the same can be achieved with varnish+nginx with much less efforts.

I had to scale a high profile Wordpress site during the pandemic. It got huge spikes daily during a press conference. It got 150k hits per second.

Apart from moving it from windows to Linux, I put it in front of varnish and spent a few hours tweaking the config to make sure everything still worked. It was my first time using varnish so it took longer.

It performed flawlessly for years.

Varnish was a real workhorse.

Don't forget all those interconnected microservices, so that every request has to be handled by dozens of machines with lots of json flying everywhere eating up CPU time that could have been spent actually carrying out the business logic instead.

It competes with CDNs, is the problem- once you use one, they take care of the caching, and you don't need to run your own. People with global customers need a CDN, and they're to cheap to build your own.

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 :)

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

Indeed, that's one of the most popular cases and I even used it myself couple of times.

Though when frontend devs cannot explain which CORS headers and for which origins they do need (again, I'm sysasmin, not even daily reader of Mozilla Developer Network), chances for server/infra level like Varnish to be mentioned is close to 0. With higher chances k8s cluster introduction to be mentioned.

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.