Transport layer security (TLS) is the de facto standard for sending and receiving secure HTTP traffic. With this in mind, Varnish long ago built a standalone TLS proxy on the open-source Hitch project. It delivers secure transport and doesn’t interfere with content delivery performance, but for a number of reasons, it’s not always the right choice for every implementation.

This blog post is “best of” covering our biggest news and most popular content from the last twelve months. It’s been a tumultuous year, to say the least, but we have continued innovating and supporting our customers in all their content delivery goals the best we can. What follows is some highlights of our year, and a summary of the useful talks and research reports we’ve been part of.

For many years, we’ve fielded questions about which is better, Varnish or NGINX? We’ve always affirmed that both are great but for very different things. They aren’t identical solutions and don’t do identical things. And sometimes, they can be used in complementary ways to get the most from both.

        
As you might know, the latest Varnish Enterprise release (6.0.6r2) adds support for in-process, or native, TLS. What does this mean, though, and why add this feature, why now?