Varnish Software unveiled a new version of Varnish Traffic Router, the latest addition to Varnish’s portfolio of private content delivery network (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. 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.
“Traffic Router is the final piece of the puzzle for the Varnish Private CDN offering,” said Frank Miller, CTO of Varnish Software. “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. It 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 quality of service, and extend their CDN footprints by applying specific routing rules based on distance, availability, utilization, history, tags, and 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 but 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 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 CDN 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.
