Co-authored by Rubén Romero and Per Buer
Marking 20 years of Varnish this month, Varnish Software has established varnish.org as the central hub for our open-source development. We are reaffirming two decades of commitment by porting key Varnish Enterprise features to the open-source core and updating the Long-Term Support roadmap. This moves Varnish toward a platform, optimized for containerized and Kubernetes environments.
We are officially supporting Rust bindings, Helm charts, Docker images, and selected modules. Key upgrades to Varnish Cache include:
In-Core TLS support: Client-side and backend TLS are coming directly to the core. This has been the most requested feature for years, and the workarounds, hitch, stunnel, envoy, nginx as a TLS terminator, add operational complexity that shouldn't be necessary in 2026. In particular, backend TLS has been quite hard to work around.
Dynamic backends: Static backend configuration doesn't fit well with service discovery and orchestrated environments where backends come and go. Dynamic backend support solves this, allowing backends to be added and removed at runtime without VCL reloads.
Kubernetes Gateway API: An official Gateway API implementation is in development. The goal is for Varnish to work as a native component in Kubernetes clusters, configured through standard Gateway API resources rather than custom integrations.
Open telemetry: Full Open Telemetry support via varnish-otel, including varnishlog-json, metrics, logs and traces.
Varnish Cache will operate as a dedicated downstream distribution of the Vinyl project. This allows to focus on containerized environments while maintaining the stability built over the last two decades.
Varnish Software remains a core participant in the Vinyl Cache Project, collaborating on release and security issues just as we have since 2006. While the codebases might eventually drift, the priority remains delivering a distribution tailored for modern cloud infrastructure.
We are retiring Varnish Cache 6.0 and moving to a new Long-Term Support release to keep the stable foundation modern.
Next LTS: This will be based on version 8.0 or the version scheduled for March 2026, which will be the first based on the Vinyl upstream.
6.0 End-of-Life: Supported until March 2027 to provide a full one-year migration window for existing users.
We will be in Amsterdam for KubeCon Europe in March to share more about this new chapter for Varnish Cache. If you are attending, we would love to connect. Stop by our booth to see the roadmap in action, or book a time here to set up a dedicated meeting to discuss your cloud-native requirements.
If you want to discuss this further, you can find us here:
Discord Channel - While newer and less populated than the IRC channel, the Varnish discord server is also a good place to ask questions about configuration, HTTP, vmods or anything that’s even remotely related to Varnish.
Existing customers: You can also discuss these updates directly with your account manager.