We get a lot of questions about TLS and Varnish, and we’ve long been touting our TLS proxy, Hitch, as the best way to terminate TLS in front of Varnish. Hitch is a lightweight, high-performance TLS proxy that is entirely dedicated to TLS termination. This makes Hitch a tiny and performant tool that can be used anywhere, including in front of Varnish. One of its main features is the PROXY protocol, which is capable of capturing and transporting information about the original connection, regardless of the number of proxies it passes through.

The open source version of Varnish Cache 4.1x is no longer supported. For existing Varnish customers using Varnish Enterprise this is not an issue. For many open source Varnish Cache users this won’t be a surprise, and you will already have updated. The important point is that continued use of Varnish Cache 4.1 means that you will be going it alone. But you don’t have to.

If you’re familiar at all with Varnish, you know it improves content delivery performance by storing a copy of your content in cache, and every request thereafter is fulfilled by the cached content.