VCL or "Varnish Configuration Language" is an absolutely brilliant idea, which I may have said once or twice already, but it can be a bit much to wrap your head around the first time you approach it, and the built-in VCL notion is an extra curveball. So today, we sit down and tackle this.

We'll avoid examples, long descriptions and overly complex details to focus on the high-level and almost philosophical concepts governing the VCL. Let's do this!

Did you know that Hitch is now available as a container image on the dockerhub? I'm asking because it's time to revisit an blog post of mine (4 years, time flies!) and to streamline things a bit. Nowadays containers are ubiquitous, so we can skip the basics, and thanks to the dockerhub images, we don't even need to write our own Dockerfile like we used to. Ain't that nice?

Our base will look a lot like the previous setup, but for this specific blog post, we are going to focus almost exclusively on how to integrate Hitch with Varnish. As you will see it is very straightforward thanks to upstream work, but it will be an opportunity to explore a few interesting notions along the way.

One aspect of Varnish that customers and enthusiasts most often ask questions about is how to make more effective use of Varnish’s powerful logging features. Logging and log management is important because your logs can be a real-time account of what is happening behind the scenes with your web traffic and transactions, resource performance, and much more. The detailed nature of logs lets you identify specific issues, anomalies or patterns and troubleshoot, sometimes getting to root causes of problems or seeing and stopping threats emerge before they can do any damage.

A few weeks ago, I wrote and post introducing the concept of Hit-for-Miss and I received a few questions about it because "Hit-for-Pass" is much more common on the interwebz, and it looks like it could do something similar, and I completely omitted it last time. What's up with that?

Let's embark on a short chronological journey explaining how HfM and HfP (as the cool kids call them) came to be, how they are different and why you should care.