New Version of Varnish Controller Available Now

The Varnish Controller is our administration solution for managing large Varnish Enterprise environments, offering provisioning, scaling and monitoring capabilities for Varnish clusters and multi-tenant environments. And now, we’re delighted to release Varnish Controller 4.1.0 to the world! See the release notes and change log here. This version of Controller adds features, fixes and improvements, including new tools for Traffic Router, the built-in solution for directing CDN traffic.

You should upgrade all of the Controller components in your architecture for this release. See more about how Varnish Controller versioning works here. Let’s take a look at the new features.

Custom routing rules in Traffic Router 

Controller 4.1.0 supports custom routing decisions using Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) plugins.

Traffic Router, Controller’s integrated system for request routing, already contains a common set of routing rules based on utilization, history, location, and more. Nonetheless, there are cases where routing decisions should be based on external factors such as database lookups or Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcements. An external plugin via gRPC can be used for these customized routing use cases. The gRPC service is handed information related to the request, such as HTTP headers, client IP and available endpoints. The service uses this information, together with external data, to decide which endpoint to route to. Find out more about setting up custom routing processes here.

Integrated help and support resources

You can now access useful information and resources from the sidebar menu in the Controller UI. This includes full API documentation, contact details for Varnish support and Controller Gather. This tool collects lots of important system information that system administrators and Varnish support engineers can use for debugging or information collection.

Updated VCL editor

The Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) editor has undergone a major redesign, making it easy to keep track of related VCL files. Tabs let you switch between different VCL files and you can now compile code with different servers easily. Debugging and compilation information are displayed clearly under the VCL code, and on the left, you’ll also find a list of the VCLGroups that use the file you’re working on.

Other improvements

• The controller command line client now supports using a  proxy
• Statistic counters can be defined using a wildcard
• Improved log output throughout the system
  • Support for timestamps are now enabled by default
  • Unified router/agent log messages
• Various bug fixes and performance improvements

Notes on updating

See Varnish Controller Changelog for more details on the changes and the upgrade notes for more details on how to upgrade. This update is recommended for all users. Take a look at the Varnish Controller Deprecation page to prepare for upcoming major changes.