Varnish version 2 and beyond

[Sten Spans]

On Tue, 31 Oct 2006, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

>
>
> Varnish version 1 has been out for some time now, and it is time
> to talk about varnish version 2 and the future in general.
>
> I told Anders that I wanted a bit of vacation before I even
> contemplated the future.  That is why I have been relatively silent
> and inactive since the release.
>
> But I have also talked to a number of early Varnish users and given
> a couple of talks about Varnish in various settings and the reception
> have been very warm and postive.
>
> And then everybody asks me "What happens next ?  What about version 2 ?"
>
> So lets me open the discussion about version 2 with a loooong email:
>
>
> What ?
> ======
>
> The features I have heard people ask for so far are:
>
>    Things we already know how to do:
> 	Bugfixes
> 	Docs
> 	More VCL
> 	Simple Server side includes.
> 	Vary: header processing (requirement for compression etc.)
> 	Compression.
> 	tar storage method for static/emergency contents
> 	The cluster controller

I just now started looking at varnish, after watching your eurobsdcon
presentation. I'm looking into varnish as a frontend for remote and local
freebsd/linux mirrors. A small 1gb package cache reachable via l2 speeds 
things up quite a bit.

The main thing that seems to be missing (for my purposes) is more control 
over the request sent to the backends, Host: and url rewriting in vcl 
would be nice. If some more flexibility is added then people who currently 
use apache+mod_rewrite should feel right at home.

A trivial switch to use the backend hostname instead of the client 
supplied hostname would cover most cases though.


Thanks for the great software.

-- 
Sten Spans

"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."
Leonard Cohen - Anthem