Varnish Software - year in review

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.

As for 2021, we’re looking forward to seeing more of our customers, especially after broadening our horizons this year and opening offices in Tokyo, Singapore, and Los Angeles to be closer to customers old and new. See you soon!

blog banner 2020 highlights 6

Big news: Varnish Edge Cloud launch

One of our highlights of the year was the launch of Varnish Edge Cloud, our 5G-ready virtualized CDN solution that helps network operators harness the power of 5G to offer new services and reach more people, faster.

It is highly scalable caching software for multi-access edge computing infrastructure that moves content delivery to the very edge of the network, with the dual benefits of accelerating delivery of high quality content while minimizing backhaul. For consumers, this means excellent quality of experience at all times, while network operators can offer new services, delivering more data for lower resource utilization and costs.

Download the brochure here, or get in touch with one of our edge cloud architects to find out more.

A year in webinars

In a year without in-person meetings and events, we ramped up our webinar output, with two sessions in particular proving very popular:

Top 10 Varnish Dos and Don’ts

Whether you’re using Varnish Cache to speed up your own website or deploying Varnish Enterprise on a large scale streaming operation, this webinar has crucial tips, tricks and best practices for you.

How to build a cloud-native CDN (with Intel and VMware)

We also discussed building vCDNs for telcos with Intel and VMware, who we have partnered with on a cloud-native CDN specification for telcos. This conversation, hosted by Light Reading, covers all the issues around bringing scalability to the edge, and everything we’ve learnt during our project to develop the solution.

Varnish joins new partnerships

As well as broadening our horizons both East and West with new office openings, Varnish made many new friends in 2020, a year which saw us:

Getting ahead of 5G

The release of Varnish Edge Cloud comes at a fortuitous time, when many telcos and network operators are looking to leverage 5G and multi-access edge computing to take control of content delivery on their networks and enter new markets. To go along with our solution for powering the future of content distribution on 5G networks, we also offered thought leadership and practical insight into capitalizing on the new technology:

A wealth of new features

As the team behind the open-source project Varnish Cache and the enterprise software Varnish Enterprise, development continued at pace to support new use cases and solve new challenges. Some of the features added to Varnish Enterprise this year included:

In-process TLS - native TLS termination
Memory Governor - Automatically scales cache size
Resolver VMOD - Reverse IP DNS resolution
JWT VMOD - Support for JSON Web Tokens
Brotli VMOD - End-to-end support for Brotli compression

For more information on Varnish features, and upgrading to the latest versions, visit our Documentation page.

Varnish pushes the limit

We also reached a new milestone in performance this year, working with Intel on testing across various bare metal and containerized setups. The research saw Varnish Enterprise hit 190Gbps from a single virtualized edge node!

This makes it possible to benefit from virtualization, without performance downsides, while gaining the capacity needed for the latest data-hungry video use cases.

Find out more about the research in our report.

Varnish in the cloud

Varnish also expanded across cloud platforms, from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud to Oracle Cloud and DigitalOcean, making it easier and cheaper than ever to spin up Varnish in the cloud. The cloud is an ideal place to run Varnish for last minute caching or origin protection needs, low cost testing before deploying fully, and building your own custom CDN.

You can get $100 free credit to try Varnish Cache on DigitalOcean, here. It takes less than a minute to deploy!

best_2020_Blog_CTA