Varnish Software, a leader in caching, streaming, and content delivery software solutions, unveiled a new version of Varnish Traffic Router, the latest addition to Varnish’s portfolio of private CDN offerings. The solution is ideal for video delivery and data-heavy web content, as it provides advanced tools for load balancing and traffic routing to ensure content is always delivered from the optimal location for the best user experience possible. Now, built-in to the user interface is an intuitive world map displaying the CDN deployment and allowing clear identification of traffic load, making it easy to add resources where they are needed most.
Built into the Varnish Controller 5.0 CDN administration console, Traffic Router was on display and demonstrated for the first time at IBC2022.
“Traffic Router is the final piece of the puzzle for the Varnish Private CDN offering,” said Frank Miller, Varnish Software’s Chief Technology Officer. “It enables us to deliver all the key components for a private CDN in a unified interface and software solution. From one place, users can manage and control caching, configuration, monitoring, request routing, traffic load balancing and more. Best of all, Traffic Router extends functionality considerably while being less complex than the alternatives on the market.”
Designed to deliver an optimal user experience, the new Traffic Router ensures clients are always fetching content from available, optimal cache servers, regardless of scale or network complexity. The Traffic Router integrates seamlessly with the Varnish Controller to deliver all the components of a Private CDN solution and provides a complete picture of CDN activity with counters, statistics and charts integrated into a single, user-friendly, customizable dashboard. Statistics are real-time, historical and can be organized by domain and tags.
With this combined solution, content providers can simplify operations, maintain high availability, guarantee a quality of service, and extend their CDN footprint by applying specific routing rules based on Distance, Availability, Utilization, History, Tags, Random or External Endpoints.
In times of high traffic or unforeseen demand, a caching service may reach full utilization, or the headroom may be unacceptably small, leading to risks of downtime or suboptimal user experiences. Short notice broadcasting changes may also require streaming services to handle many more visitors without time to scale up the core network.
The new Traffic Router ensures quality of service by scaling out and routing traffic to external endpoints, such as a public content delivery network (CDN), when existing nodes are fully utilized. This maintains performance and uptime when scaling rapidly during traffic changes or when needing to extend caching to one or multiple CDNs’ footprints.
Additionally, if CDN locations are unexpectedly offline, unhealthy, overutilized or otherwise unavailable, the Traffic Router can still maintain high availability and the best user experience by routing traffic to the best caching nodes and well-functioning cache servers, so no requests hit unavailable locations or get dropped. Active health checking and public CDN endpoint checks also take place to ensure cache quality.
This recent product enhancement adds to Varnish Software’s growing portfolio of new solutions, including Controller 5.0, that are specifically designed to work with Varnish at scale, have distributed cache invalidation, route requests for uninterrupted service, scale beyond existing capacity and extend coverage. Additionally, Varnish Controller dashboard manages all components of a Private CDN setup, including edge caching, origin shield, configuration and monitoring, load balancing and traffic routing.
