Varnish 6.0 is out - get it on-prem or on AWS, as the cloud matures

Not long ago, The Register offered this tongue-in-cheek prediction: “What sector of tech is forecast to grow fatter than the Slovakian economy or Elon Musk’s ego in 2018? The cloud. Global spending on the fluffy white stuff is predicted by mystics at Gartner to reach $175.8bn this year.” This doesn’t appear to have been an exaggeration. A cloud industry insights report from Right Scale indicated that 96% of companies across industries have embraced cloud services, for any number of reasons, including faster, more innovative delivery and cost reductions, among others. And more than half of the companies surveyed were deploying multiple clouds for different reasons as well as any number of hybrid on-premise and cloud mashups that together make up a custom solution to suit each individual company.

That’s where we are in the market: the cloud is fully mainstream, but it’s not the only stream. Multiple streams flow into very different sets of bespoke technology solutions that suit individual firms. That echoes the experience we’ve seen at Varnish. Many companies sign up for Varnish in the cloud to get temporary performance gains during peak traffic periods and find that they can continue to use Varnish in the cloud, or in some cases, they find that they want an on-premise Varnish subscription. That’s the beauty of the cloud as well: the flexibility to try something out to see how it’s going to work in a production environment and scale up and down as needed.

Varnish in the cloud: Varnish 6.0 is available

Varnish has been available on all the major cloud platforms for a long time already, and as Varnish itself develops, we’ve aimed to ensure that Varnish cloud development keeps pace. Not long ago, we launched Varnish 6.0, and now it’s also available on the AWS Marketplace. At the same time as Varnish 6.0’s new features make their way to the cloud, we should clear up some confusion that’s cropped up.

Our product suite, previously known as Varnish Plus, has been renamed as Varnish Enterprise, and it’s essentially the same package of features and benefits that were available in Varnish Plus.

For Varnish Enterprise 6.0 on AWS, you’ll see both ease-of-use and performance improvements and continue to be able to access the most popular Varnish features:

• Varnish High Availability (VHA), a high-performance content replicator that helps ensure uptime and reliability

• Varnish Cache Plus, which caches and delivers your web content at 300-1000% faster

• SSL/TLS front and backend support

As always Varnish lets you handle more traffic with fewer resources while achieving significantly enhanced performance and scalability. And because it’s in the cloud, you have immediate control over when and how to use the Varnish cloud resources when and as you need more capacity.