Happy Birthday Varnish-Cache: SLASH/ storage engines version 1.0.0-rc1 released

[Nils Goroll]

Celebrating the 18th anniversary of Varnish-Cache and the first anniversary of 
the SLASH/ storage engines today, your Open-Source Varnish-Cache friends from 
UPLEX have just tagged the first version 1.0.0 candidate of our extension with 
storage engines (stevedores) and storage routers (loadmasters).

Over the past year, we have received a lot of helpful input from our users and 
have implemented substantial improvements. THANK YOU to everyone who has 
contributed by reporting issues, providing feedback and, just recently, adding 
documentation. SLASH/fellow has also helped improve Varnish-Cache itself.

After rigorous testing in particular over the past weeks, we now boldly claim 
that SLASH/ deserves a 1.0 version tag.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY Varnish-Cache!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SLASH/buddy and SLASH/fellow!

     -

The remainder of this announcement is identical to the initial announcement one 
year ago:

The preferred public repository with support for issues, merge-requests and 
other activities is at

     https://gitlab.com/uplex/varnish/slash


buddy
-----

The buddy storage engine is an advanced, high performance stevedore with a fixed 
memory size based on a new buddy memory allocator implementation from first 
principles.

Its main advantages are that it only uses a fixed amount of memory and solves 
the LRU fairness issue in Varnish-Cache.

fellow
------

The fellow storage engine is an advanced, high performance, eventually 
persistent, always consistent implementation based on the same allocator as the 
buddy storage engine.

It eventually persists all objects on stable storage. Both raw devices and files 
are supported, but NVMe or other flash based storage with high random I/O 
throughput at low latency times is recommended as the underlying medium.

loadmasters
-----------

Two simple storage routers are provided by the module for now, round-robin and hash.

what else?
----------

* slashmap is a curses interface to visualize allocations in real time

* Yes, we have statistics and counters. Not enough of them yet, though.

To read more:

https://gitlab.com/uplex/varnish/slash/-/blob/master/README.rst

https://gitlab.com/uplex/varnish/slash/-/blob/master/src/vmod_slash.man.rst