Google Cloud

Varnish Software’s Varnish Cloud offering is available on Google Cloud Platform as a single virtual machine (VM), pay-as-you-go (PAYG) solution. Each VM image contains the latest version of each Varnish Software product, optimized for use with the Google Cloud Platform Compute Engine.

There are two products and four types of VM images accessible at the current stage.

• Varnish Enterprise 6 (Red Hat)
• Varnish Enterprise 6 (Ubuntu)
• Varnish Custom Statistics (Red Hat)
• Varnish Custom Statistics (Ubuntu)

Installing the Varnish Software VM

To quickly set up a Varnish Software environment on the Google Cloud Platform using GCP Marketplace:

1. Access the Varnish Software Inc page in the GCP Marketplace, select the product you want to try, and click the LAUNCH button.
2. If you are not in a project, you will be asked to Select or create a project.
3. If you have not registered your billing information, you will be asked to Enable free trial.
4. The GCP Marketplace Preview window opens to deploy the solution. Specify Deployment name, Zone, Machine type, Boot Disk, Networking, External IP and IP forwarding.

Note that: In the Firewall section, we recommended that you leave the suggested TCP port traffic checkboxes in order to allow the solution to work properly with default configurations. For more information on controlling incoming traffic, click the gray help button, which takes you to Firewalls in the Google Cloud Platform Compute Engine documentation.

5. Click the Deploy button. The GCP Marketplace confirms that the selected Varnish Software product was deployed. As soon as the new VM launches, the main component of each product starts automatically and serves a default configuration. There is also a small snippet on Suggested next steps for each product to help you discover what more you can do with your instance.
6. To verify that VE6 is working, point you web browser to the public Site address and a welcome page is shown. To test if VCS is working properly, point a web browser to access the public Site address and the default VCS port (6555) and view the displayed page.

General information regarding the configuration of the software

The configuration files are located in different places based on what kind of instances you are running, Varnish Enterprise (VE6) or Varnish Custom Statistics (VCS)

In this section, we cover configuration basics. For more details and advanced configuration possibilities, please select the links below.

• Varnish Enterprise
• Varnish Custom Statistics (VCS)

Varnish Enterprise and Varnish Cache

VE6 is the enterprise version of Varnish Cache. Apart from ease-of-use improvements and performance enhancements, VE6 also provides additional functionality, such as Varnish Massive Storage Engine (MSE), Varnish High Availability (VHA) and SSL/TLS backend support. Customers can also enable frontend SSL/TLS by using Varnish Plus Addon SSL (Hitch), which is also included with the image.

By default, varnishd process should be running on TCP 80 and 8443. Hitch will be running on port 443.

• Default VCL configuration
  • /etc/varnish/default.vcl

Parameter tuning

Your Varnish instance has been pre-configured with the default settings, which suits most Varnish users. We advise you to have a look and update the configuration according to your needs.

Our documentation site has a reference section with all available runtime options. This will help you to properly configure the Varnish process.

To look at the system parameters run this command:

sudo systemctl cat varnish.service

To change the runtime options, run the following command on your Varnish instance so that you can override the default values:

sudo systemctl edit varnish.service

Edit accordingly and save the file.

And finally, restart Varnish, by running the following command:

sudo systemctl restart varnish.service

You can do the same for hitch.service

Varnish Custom Statistics (VCS)

VCS should run out of the box without any additional effort. Point a web browser to the public DNS name and the default TCP port and view the page.

• Varnish Custom Statistics (VCS)
  • Red Hat 7
    • /etc/varnish/vstatd.params
  • Ubuntu
    • /etc/default/vstatd

What if you need help?

If you encounter any problems with configuring our products, online user documentation is available here.

Customers who purchase VE or VCS VM images on the Google Cloud Platform are eligible for Varnish Cloud support and software updates provided by the Varnish Software Inc. engineering team. To contact support, please submit the Varnish Cloud Support Activation form.

What’s next?

Please visit the Post Configuration for more information about what you can do with Varnish Cloud products. For example:

• How to configure vstatdprobe to forward data to VCS for analysis