Varnish minus VCL?

[Luke Macpherson]

> How many servers do you have that this is a concern?

Enough. Though frankly, even if you had a small number of servers it
would still be nice to support pluggable load balancing and failover
models.

> Have you considered just putting perlbal or a load-balancer appliance
> between varnish and your backend servers?  Then the dedicated device
> can take care of load-balancing, fail-over and all that fun - and you
> can use the management systems there to take backend servers in and
> out.   Varnish then will just have to do what it does so well, caching.

Inserting a bottleneck and single point of failure doesn't sound like
a good idea. Having m varnish servers talking to n backends gives a
much better failover and redundancy model.

By the way, I'm not asking anyone to implement this for me. I am a
software engineer (not a network administrator), and since I have to
do this anyway it's worth doing it in a way that can potentially
contribute back to the project.