4 ms·

Vinyl Cache and Varnish Cache

stephenr 4mo ago
The comparison with MySQL/MariaDB is unfortunate, given that since the "split" MariaDB has shown itself to be every bit the corporate owned "FOSS" project while its supporters still harp on about how terrible oracle is for OSS, without actually acknowledging the real history of each respective project and accompanying company. Given that MariaDB the company is now owned by a private equity firm, I doubt it's going to get better.
- Intermernet 4mo ago
  Still got Percona, but I'm not sure what their status is at the moment.
  - stephenr 4mo ago
    To me the biggest "unknown" with Percona is that MariaDB (the company) bought out Codership (the creators of Galera Cluster, which XtraDB Cluster is based on) and it doesn't seem to be OSS any more. I'm sure for some shops this will drive them to pay for the same feature in MariaDB cluster, but I'm more likely to just transition to MySQL Group Replication. This is my whole point about MariaDB - they are steadily making their OSS software completely dependent on the company (paid) versions for anything beyond toy scale.
    - evanelias 4mo ago
      I don't think your last sentence is fair. Many workloads don't need something like Galera, as standard async replication scales to extreme levels, and you can achieve excellent HA with external orchestration and/or proxies. FOSS MariaDB is definitely not toy-scale only. Oracle has also been guilty of locking modern table stakes behind the MySQL Enterprise / Heatwave pay gate, such as vector indexes and JS stored procedures. And while they've recently announced more of this stuff will move to FOSS soon, at the same time their response rate to new bug reports has become worse than ever before, which is deeply worrying. And a couple days ago Oracle announced that they're nonsensically changing their MySQL versioning/LTS naming yet again. So now the way you identify an LTS is "major version is an even-numbered last two digits of a year, while minor version is exactly 4 to represent LTS releases always being in April." So for example MySQL 28.4 will be LTS, but 28.7 and 28.10 are not. But prior to this, 9.7 and 8.4 are LTS, and 8.0 was de facto LTS but now EOL. It's bizarre. I wish I was joking!
      - stephenr 4mo ago
        > such as vector indexes and JS stored procedures So, the stuff that basically appeals to people chasing the AI dragon, and has zero practical use for 99.999% of developers making real products? > I wish I was joking! I wish I could care even a little bit about such minutiae.
        evanelias 4mo ago
        If you've ever had to work with nontrivial procs in MySQL/MariaDB, it's immediately clear how the status quo is deficient there, and why e.g. Postgres's multi-language support is so much better in comparison. And how is it "minutiae" to be able to figure out "is my database version actually supported"? This is the fourth versioning scheme they've used in less than a decade, that's a bit nuts I think.
        stephenr 4mo ago
        I would happily write stored procs using the current language support for a decade without pay, before I'd subject myself to putting javascript in a fucking database engine. > And how is it "minutiae" to be able to figure out "is my database version actually supported"? Remembering "8.4", "9.7" and ".4" just doesn't seem like a particularly big deal to me. The number* has only changed 3 times in the last 10 years.
        evanelias 4mo ago
        I don't like JS either, but lots of people do. And if you're expanding a DB beyond SQL-only, JS is an obvious first choice before adding further languages from there. (The MySQL feature is called "Multilingual Engine Component" and not "JavaScript Engine Component".) As for the versioning, it's a nightmare for third party vendors like me, because it will absolutely increase the number of companies who are unintentionally running unsupported non-LTS "innovation" releases because they can't keep all these versioning changes straight. The major-version only changed 3 times in the past decade because 8.0 was "evergreen" for most of that time, which was also not a good strategy, yet the most obvious solution (SemVer) is always ignored by Oracle in favor of more confusing alternatives.
haeseong 4mo ago
The operational wrinkle nobody mentions in the rename is that the same vulnerability now ships under two version trains. VSV00019 was just patched as Vinyl 9.0.1 and as Varnish 8.0.2 and 6.0.18, so anyone pinning a version in their package manager has to figure out which lineage their distro actually tracks before the next CVE lands.
mijoharas 4mo ago
This article links to a previous one[0] (by Poul) which states: > I will also state for the record, that there are no hard feelings between Varnish Software and the FOSS project. I wonder if that is still the case now. (this article is fairly diplomatically written, but I'd imagine it must be pretty frustrating) [0] https://vinyl-cache.org/organization/20-years.html#years https://vinyl-cache.org/organization/20-years.html#years
- Yokohiii 4mo ago
  Well I guess the enterprise side of varnish was quite beneficial to him (and the core devs) over that time. If something gives you financial freedom over 10+ years to work on a thing you love, you can't be mad at all of it. But if FOSS is deeply encoded into your DNA, you become pretty protective once you realize your project may become extinct sometimes in the future.
ksimukka 4mo ago
"Vinyl cache" is an interesting name. I wonder what other candidates the maintainers considered? I was secretly hoping they would name it "Veneer Cache" or something similar to "varnish".
- manarth 4mo ago
  And the bike shed absolutely MUST be painted blue
- flurdy 4mo ago
  Vinyl flooring etc is at least related to varnishing floors?
- JamesSwift 4mo ago
  How about Shellac Cache
ape4 4mo ago
So its not a cache for my record collection ;(
anotherhue 4mo ago
It definitely sounds more musical to my ears.
wofo 4mo ago
What a mess... It's sad that the community has to suffer the consequences of a company holding the trademark hostage.
throawayonthe 4mo ago
does the mysql/mariadb comparison actually make sense? mysql is not really a downstream distro of mariadb (maaybe even the opposite?) so i thought i understood the situation as presented until that paragraph
- Yokohiii 4mo ago
  mysql was pretty much the downstream thing that everybody used back then.
  - Sesse__ 4mo ago
    MySQL has never been downstream of MariaDB.
    - Yokohiii 4mo ago
      I am talking pre mariadb times.
      - Sesse__ 4mo ago
        Are you maybe confusing “downstream” with “mainstream”? Being “downstream” of a product means that you are a derivative of that product (your upstream), taking in basically all of their code and adding your own on top.
        Yokohiii 4mo ago
        So the meaning of downstream is different for SuperSQL (the direct derivative) and TodoApp (the commercial product)? Imho, downstream are all consumers/users of that product. I guess it's arguable how a package manager positions in that terminology. Edit: Also I originally said, "it was the thing used downstream", which just is to describe the consumers. Also not sure what I got into, because the original question is wildly confusing!
- embedding-shape 4mo ago
pbowyer 4mo ago
The one positive of this is it seems to have livened up the open source project (Vinyl Cache). Features that haven't been added for years are now being worked on, whether they step on the toes of the commercial offering or not.
ksec 4mo ago
Does Fastly still uses Vinyl Cache? Wondering who else is using it as well in production.
- youngtaff 4mo ago
  Last I heard they were migrating to WASM based edge compute that could read Varnish configs but not sure how far they got
- Sesse__ 4mo ago
  They are using a fork, although nobody _really_ knows how up-to-date it is.
- taskforcegemini 4mo ago
  maybe I missunderstand the question, but it is widely used on all kinds of websites. To speed up sites using wordpress, magento, shopware etc
sgarrity 4mo ago
In Canada, we pronounce it Vinyl CachÉE.
- IndySun 4mo ago
  Can you write that phonetically?
- dxdm 4mo ago
  Gesundheit.
ibejoeb 4mo ago
It sounds like Varnish Cache is kind of a distribution of Vinyl Cache. It's based on the FOSS project with its own downstream patches. On another topic: > The Varnish Cache FOSS software was initiated and sponsored by the Norvegian newspaper Verdens Gang. They hired a company called “Linpro” to handle the logistics and me to write the code. > From Linpro grew the company Varnish Software > IP-Lawyers still insist that Varnish Software owns the Varnish Cache name Consultants came in a just assumed the IP? It sounds like a pretty complicated cross-border ordeal, but that is still quite a leap.
- jaapz 4mo ago
  > What is Varnish Cache? > Varnish Cache is a distribution of the open-source Vinyl Cache project, made for the modern cloud: ready for Kubernetes, with built-in TLS support, and a long-term-support release cadence with extra modules and tooling layered on top. (https://www.varnish.org/index.html https://www.varnish.org/index.html)
  - ibejoeb 4mo ago
    Well there you go...
captn3m0 4mo ago
This was published in April, and we are far from consensus on what is “varnish”. Lots of distributions are now packaging vinyl and calling it varnish, some are pointing to the varnish repo instead (Fedora, Homebrew). I’d left a comment last time, but haven’t tracked it since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728216
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
geronimoisdead 4mo ago
I bet they're sorry now for sticking to principles, no one forced them to change the name. As it looks now, they'll be developing upstream but "everyone" will be using fork. Explain to me how to use vmod-tcp pacing with haproxy handling tls? Not to mention mess this caused with vmods.

The comparison with MySQL/MariaDB is unfortunate, given that since the "split" MariaDB has shown itself to be every bit the corporate owned "FOSS" project while its supporters still harp on about how terrible oracle is for OSS, without actually acknowledging the real history of each respective project and accompanying company. Given that MariaDB the company is now owned by a private equity firm, I doubt it's going to get better.

Intermernet 4mo ago
Still got Percona, but I'm not sure what their status is at the moment.
- stephenr 4mo ago
  To me the biggest "unknown" with Percona is that MariaDB (the company) bought out Codership (the creators of Galera Cluster, which XtraDB Cluster is based on) and it doesn't seem to be OSS any more. I'm sure for some shops this will drive them to pay for the same feature in MariaDB cluster, but I'm more likely to just transition to MySQL Group Replication. This is my whole point about MariaDB - they are steadily making their OSS software completely dependent on the company (paid) versions for anything beyond toy scale.
  - evanelias 4mo ago
    I don't think your last sentence is fair. Many workloads don't need something like Galera, as standard async replication scales to extreme levels, and you can achieve excellent HA with external orchestration and/or proxies. FOSS MariaDB is definitely not toy-scale only. Oracle has also been guilty of locking modern table stakes behind the MySQL Enterprise / Heatwave pay gate, such as vector indexes and JS stored procedures. And while they've recently announced more of this stuff will move to FOSS soon, at the same time their response rate to new bug reports has become worse than ever before, which is deeply worrying. And a couple days ago Oracle announced that they're nonsensically changing their MySQL versioning/LTS naming yet again. So now the way you identify an LTS is "major version is an even-numbered last two digits of a year, while minor version is exactly 4 to represent LTS releases always being in April." So for example MySQL 28.4 will be LTS, but 28.7 and 28.10 are not. But prior to this, 9.7 and 8.4 are LTS, and 8.0 was de facto LTS but now EOL. It's bizarre. I wish I was joking!
    - stephenr 4mo ago
      > such as vector indexes and JS stored procedures So, the stuff that basically appeals to people chasing the AI dragon, and has zero practical use for 99.999% of developers making real products? > I wish I was joking! I wish I could care even a little bit about such minutiae.
      - evanelias 4mo ago
        If you've ever had to work with nontrivial procs in MySQL/MariaDB, it's immediately clear how the status quo is deficient there, and why e.g. Postgres's multi-language support is so much better in comparison. And how is it "minutiae" to be able to figure out "is my database version actually supported"? This is the fourth versioning scheme they've used in less than a decade, that's a bit nuts I think.
        stephenr 4mo ago
        I would happily write stored procs using the current language support for a decade without pay, before I'd subject myself to putting javascript in a fucking database engine. > And how is it "minutiae" to be able to figure out "is my database version actually supported"? Remembering "8.4", "9.7" and ".4" just doesn't seem like a particularly big deal to me. The number* has only changed 3 times in the last 10 years.
        evanelias 4mo ago
        I don't like JS either, but lots of people do. And if you're expanding a DB beyond SQL-only, JS is an obvious first choice before adding further languages from there. (The MySQL feature is called "Multilingual Engine Component" and not "JavaScript Engine Component".) As for the versioning, it's a nightmare for third party vendors like me, because it will absolutely increase the number of companies who are unintentionally running unsupported non-LTS "innovation" releases because they can't keep all these versioning changes straight. The major-version only changed 3 times in the past decade because 8.0 was "evergreen" for most of that time, which was also not a good strategy, yet the most obvious solution (SemVer) is always ignored by Oracle in favor of more confusing alternatives.

haeseong 4mo ago

The operational wrinkle nobody mentions in the rename is that the same vulnerability now ships under two version trains. VSV00019 was just patched as Vinyl 9.0.1 and as Varnish 8.0.2 and 6.0.18, so anyone pinning a version in their package manager has to figure out which lineage their distro actually tracks before the next CVE lands.

mijoharas 4mo ago

This article links to a previous one[0] (by Poul) which states: > I will also state for the record, that there are no hard feelings between Varnish Software and the FOSS project. I wonder if that is still the case now. (this article is fairly diplomatically written, but I'd imagine it must be pretty frustrating) [0] https://vinyl-cache.org/organization/20-years.html#years https://vinyl-cache.org/organization/20-years.html#years

Yokohiii 4mo ago
Well I guess the enterprise side of varnish was quite beneficial to him (and the core devs) over that time. If something gives you financial freedom over 10+ years to work on a thing you love, you can't be mad at all of it. But if FOSS is deeply encoded into your DNA, you become pretty protective once you realize your project may become extinct sometimes in the future.

ksimukka 4mo ago

"Vinyl cache" is an interesting name. I wonder what other candidates the maintainers considered? I was secretly hoping they would name it "Veneer Cache" or something similar to "varnish".

manarth 4mo ago
And the bike shed absolutely MUST be painted blue
flurdy 4mo ago
Vinyl flooring etc is at least related to varnishing floors?
JamesSwift 4mo ago
How about Shellac Cache

ape4 4mo ago

So its not a cache for my record collection ;(

anotherhue 4mo ago

It definitely sounds more musical to my ears.

wofo 4mo ago

What a mess... It's sad that the community has to suffer the consequences of a company holding the trademark hostage.

throawayonthe 4mo ago

does the mysql/mariadb comparison actually make sense? mysql is not really a downstream distro of mariadb (maaybe even the opposite?) so i thought i understood the situation as presented until that paragraph

Yokohiii 4mo ago
mysql was pretty much the downstream thing that everybody used back then.
- Sesse__ 4mo ago
  MySQL has never been downstream of MariaDB.
  - Yokohiii 4mo ago
    I am talking pre mariadb times.
    - Sesse__ 4mo ago
      Are you maybe confusing “downstream” with “mainstream”? Being “downstream” of a product means that you are a derivative of that product (your upstream), taking in basically all of their code and adding your own on top.
      - Yokohiii 4mo ago
        So the meaning of downstream is different for SuperSQL (the direct derivative) and TodoApp (the commercial product)? Imho, downstream are all consumers/users of that product. I guess it's arguable how a package manager positions in that terminology. Edit: Also I originally said, "it was the thing used downstream", which just is to describe the consumers. Also not sure what I got into, because the original question is wildly confusing!
embedding-shape 4mo ago

pbowyer 4mo ago

The one positive of this is it seems to have livened up the open source project (Vinyl Cache). Features that haven't been added for years are now being worked on, whether they step on the toes of the commercial offering or not.

ksec 4mo ago

Does Fastly still uses Vinyl Cache? Wondering who else is using it as well in production.

youngtaff 4mo ago
Last I heard they were migrating to WASM based edge compute that could read Varnish configs but not sure how far they got
Sesse__ 4mo ago
They are using a fork, although nobody _really_ knows how up-to-date it is.
taskforcegemini 4mo ago
maybe I missunderstand the question, but it is widely used on all kinds of websites. To speed up sites using wordpress, magento, shopware etc

sgarrity 4mo ago

In Canada, we pronounce it Vinyl CachÉE.

IndySun 4mo ago
Can you write that phonetically?
dxdm 4mo ago
Gesundheit.

ibejoeb 4mo ago

It sounds like Varnish Cache is kind of a distribution of Vinyl Cache. It's based on the FOSS project with its own downstream patches. On another topic: > The Varnish Cache FOSS software was initiated and sponsored by the Norvegian newspaper Verdens Gang. They hired a company called “Linpro” to handle the logistics and me to write the code. > From Linpro grew the company Varnish Software > IP-Lawyers still insist that Varnish Software owns the Varnish Cache name Consultants came in a just assumed the IP? It sounds like a pretty complicated cross-border ordeal, but that is still quite a leap.

jaapz 4mo ago
> What is Varnish Cache? > Varnish Cache is a distribution of the open-source Vinyl Cache project, made for the modern cloud: ready for Kubernetes, with built-in TLS support, and a long-term-support release cadence with extra modules and tooling layered on top. (https://www.varnish.org/index.html https://www.varnish.org/index.html)
- ibejoeb 4mo ago
  Well there you go...

captn3m0 4mo ago

This was published in April, and we are far from consensus on what is “varnish”. Lots of distributions are now packaging vinyl and calling it varnish, some are pointing to the varnish repo instead (Fedora, Homebrew). I’d left a comment last time, but haven’t tracked it since: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728216

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

geronimoisdead 4mo ago

I bet they're sorry now for sticking to principles, no one forced them to change the name. As it looks now, they'll be developing upstream but "everyone" will be using fork. Explain to me how to use vmod-tcp pacing with haproxy handling tls? Not to mention mess this caused with vmods.