Varnish Software has released a new version of Varnish Enterprise, its flagship caching software. The release adds features and optimisations designed to enhance Varnish Enterprise and make it easier to build complex edge logic and succeed in multi-tenant environments.

Spun out of the open source Varnish Cache project in 2010, Varnish Enterprise is the company’s commercial software, developed for enterprise content providers and network operators, with features aimed at specific business needs.

The latest release reflects this, extending the capabilities of Varnish Enterprise as a platform for building tailored content delivery services with flexible, hardware-agnostic caching and edge computing tools.

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Braastad: ‘We’re adding tools that help developers build edge logic on top of the Varnish platform’

Varnish Enterprise 6.0.8r2 also adds new Varnish modules, or VMODs, which extend the core functionality of the software. In this release, a metrics collection VMOD (called accounting) makes it easy to collect metrics in multi-tenant setups. For example, where an enterprise has one CDN but each department is a different tenant, or a web service hosts multiple domains on each server.

Also, video services that split their workloads across live, VoD and live channel statistics will be able to examine data from each tenant separately.

Other VMODs add functionality for dynamic load balancing, handling Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and modifying health probes, with benefits for routing across multiple nodes and using dynamic backends, such as cloud services.

Another major new feature is Transit Buffer, which optimises memory consumption when serving large objects like ISO files.

Espen Braastad, VP engineering, Varnish Software, said: “We consistently enhance our software to provide the features our customers need in the increasingly competitive content distribution landscape that they work in.

”In this release, we’re adding tools that help developers build edge logic on top of the Varnish platform, so they can deliver enhanced experiences right from the edge of their networks and control their content delivery in a more tailored way.

”Creating new functionality for multi-tenant environments is also in line with the growing popularity of cloud-based architectures and continues our belief that Varnish Enterprise should work everywhere and thrive in every deployment.”