In this blog post we’re exploring some aspects of Varnish Enterprise that enable what it is best known for: excellent performance. When we talk about the performance of caching servers, what do we mean?

In this week’s episode of Two-Minute Tech Tuesday, we'll talk about Hitch. Hitch is an open-source TLS proxy that Varnish develops and maintains. It can be used to terminate TLS, which is especially useful if you're using Varnish Cache.

In this week’s episode of Two-Minute Tech Tuesday, we'll talk about the PROXY protocol. The PROXY protocol transports client connection information across multiple proxy servers. It's used by Varnish to facilitate TLS termination. It's not a replacement for HTTP, in fact it operates on a different layer of the network stack, and comes as a preamble that is prepended to request data.

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.