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Followers632

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Varnish

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Followers1.3K

+ 1

Votes358

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Traefik vs Varnish: What are the differences?

Developers describe Traefik as "Load Balancer for Microservices". Træfɪk is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer made to deploy microservices with ease. It supports several backends (Docker, Swarm, Mesos/Marathon, Kubernetes, Consul, Etcd, Zookeeper, BoltDB, Rest API, file...) to manage its configuration automatically and dynamically. On the other hand, Varnish is detailed as "High-performance HTTP accelerator". Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture.

Traefik can be classified as a tool in the "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy" category, while Varnish is grouped under "Web Cache".

"Kubernetes integration" is the top reason why over 10 developers like Traefik, while over 99 developers mention "High-performance" as the leading cause for choosing Varnish.

Traefik and Varnish are both open source tools. It seems that Traefik with 23K GitHub stars and 2.36K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Varnish with 908 GitHub stars and 216 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Varnish has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1003 company stacks & 135 developers stacks; compared to Traefik, which is listed in 46 company stacks and 17 developer stacks.

Pros of Traefik

Pros of Varnish

15
Kubernetes integration
13
Watch service discovery updates
10
Letsencrypt support
8
Swarm integration
8
Several backends
3
Rancher integration
2
Ready-to-use dashboard
1
Easy setup
1
Mantl integration
1
Mesos integration

102
High-performance
66
Very Fast
56
Very Stable
43
Very Robust
36
HTTP reverse proxy
20
Open Source
17
Web application accelerator
10
Easy to config
4
Widely Used
3
Great community
1
Essential software for HTTP

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Cons of Traefik

Cons of Varnish

6
Complicated setup
5
Not very performant (fast)

No cons available

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What is Traefik?

A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.

What is Varnish?

Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture.

What companies use Traefik?

What companies use Varnish?

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What tools integrate with Traefik?

What tools integrate with Varnish?

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What are some alternatives to Traefik and Varnish?

HAProxy

HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.

Kong

Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform.

nginx

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

Istio

Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

Envoy

Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures.

See all alternatives

Interest over time

News about Traefik

Setting up Traefik as a Dynamically-Configured Proxy and Load-Balancer

(rancher.com)

Jul 12, 2017

More news

News about Varnish

Speed drives e-commerce web performance in crises, peaks, holidays and every day

(info.varnish-software.com)

13 hours ago

Request coalescing and other reasons to use Varnish as origin shield