20 Years of Varnish: A Cloud-Native Distribution (In-Core TLS, K8s Gateway API)

Author here. To mark 20 years of Varnish Cache, we are releasing a new downstream distribution built for Kubernetes.

Technical Summary:

* In-Core TLS: Termination is handled natively by the engine process. No sidecars required.

* K8s Gateway API: Full implementation. Routing is defined via standard Kubernetes resources. Code here: https://github.com/varnish/gateway

* No VCL: A new Rust routing engine ("Ghost") handles dynamic traffic. VCL is not required for standard routing.

* Observability: Native OpenTelemetry/Prometheus exporters and structured JSON logs.

Home of our downstream distribution: https://varnish.org