Varnish Enterprise is now available in public repositories

Varnish Enterprise is now available in public repositories and registries, ready for immediate testing. All users (including you!) can now access packages directly!

The big change

Historically, we’ve protected our packages using private repositories: you’d sign a contract and we’d send you an access token to packagecloud.io (deb/rpm) or to quai.io (containers). After configuring the repositories/registries, you could download the packages and deploy. While straightforward in principle, this approach has limitations

Because Varnish Enterprise is not a unified product but rather a constellation of tools, and different customers want different things. As the repository was our unit of configuration, it was cumbersome to add new features to a setup. It basically amounted to multiplying repositories with different URLs and different access tokens.

So, over the past year, we’ve been working on implementing license support inside Varnish, the same way the Controller does it. This means that Varnish can unlock new features simply by upgrading a license file on disk, without having to configure new repositories.

With license support in place, this means we don’t need to hide our packages and images behind gated repositories, instead, we can make our software available publicly:

• packages.varnish-software.com for deb/rpm
• Docker hub for containers

This new model highlights the distinction between this free tier and the open-source version. While we have spent the last decade differentiating Varnish Enterprise from Varnish Cache, we believe there is a balance to be struck.

Since Varnish Enterprise is based on Varnish Cache, we want to provide a strong baseline of features for free (Open-Source and Enterprise), while reserving the most advanced capabilities for Enterprise licensing. This is why the public packages are bundled with a license that gives you access to:

• All the vmods in varnish-modules (they’re already in our official Docker image and distributions tend to package them)
• varnish-otel (observability is a must and if we all agree on the counter names, this means we can all share dashboards instead of having to rebuild them all the time)
• TLS, on the client side and on the backend side. While TLS is technically not available in Varnish Cache, we live in a TLS world. We believe there is no point in forcing everyone to make the same aftermarket changes to their setup just to achieve this modern standard.

Unlockable Features

Beyond this baseline, Varnish Enterprise offers extensive advanced capabilities. Should you decide to unlock features (like disk caching with MSE4, or global rate-limiting), it can be done with a simple file update, not by reconfiguring extra registries. And if you would like to take some or all of these features for advanced content delivery, increased security or better observability for a spin, you can head over here and start a trial by yourself right now.

Try it out

Varnish 6.0.16r9 is available publicly right now:

And if you need deb/rpm packages, the instructions over at packages.varnish-software.com/varnishplus/60-enterprise are very straightforward, with a one-liner option. For the full installation instructions, you can of course check the official documentation as usual. 

Questions? Reach out to us directly via our live chat, email, or on Discord. We're here to help!