With the release of Varnish Enterprise 6.0.18r5,
vmod-ratelimit,
vmod-cwt,
varnish-otel,
vmod-kv, and
vmod-nodes are promoted to
General Availability (GA) and included as standard Varnish Enterprise
features. These modules previously required a separate Licensed
Add-on
license; they are now available in every Varnish Enterprise deployment
without an add-on license or configuration change.
Security and access control
vmod-ratelimit: cluster-wide rate limiting coordinated via an
external NATS message broker, for PoP-level or global abuse
mitigation. This is distinct from vmod-vsthrottle, which handles
single-node rate limiting.vmod-cwt: CBOR Web Token (CWT) validation at the edge, for Common
Access Token (CAT) workflows, IoT, and binary-token authentication.Edge compute, routing, and state
vmod-kv: state management operating locally or via a distributed
backend such as Valkey or Redis, for cluster-wide session state,
dynamic A/B allocation, and edge compute logic in VCL.vmod-nodes: backend definitions driven by configuration files, with
dynamic updates so routing topologies can change without a VCL
reload.Observability
varnish-otel: OpenTelemetry export of logs, metrics, and traces to
backends such as Grafana, Datadog, and Honeycomb.This release also ships an enhanced, experimental payload data
allocator purpose-built for Massive Storage Engine (MSE4), improving memory density
and reclaim speed for large allocations. It is disabled by default;
set the yalloc_enable parameter to enable it.
Customers already licensed for these add-ons see no operational change; existing configuration continues to work as before.