Varnish Software Unveils Advanced Features at IBC2025: Global Rate Limiting, CDN Router, and Layered Security Suite

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – August 26, 2025 – Varnish Software, a global leader in high-performance caching and content delivery, today announced significant new capabilities for Varnish Enterprise, its flagship content delivery platform. Debuting at IBC2025, additional  enhancements include Global Rate Limiting for real-time, distributed traffic control and a sophisticated CDN Router for intelligent multi-CDN traffic steering, alongside other advancements designed to provide unparalleled control and efficiency for broadcasters, streaming platforms, and enterprises.

Modern content delivery demands more intelligent and resilient infrastructure. Varnish Enterprise's new features are engineered to meet these challenges head-on, offering technical benefits and practical use cases for a demanding technical audience.

Global Rate Limiting: Coordinated Traffic Control at Scale 

Addressing the critical need for robust traffic management in distributed environments, Global Rate Limiting in Varnish Enterprise enables coordinated enforcement of traffic policies across all Varnish nodes. Unlike traditional local limits that leave systems vulnerable to distributed attacks, this new capability ensures a single, logical rate limit is applied consistently across multi-node and multi-PoP deployments. Each node shares and consumes usage data via a lightweight messaging backbone (NATS), allowing for real-time evaluation of every request within the context of global usage. This proactive approach blocks abuse early, fairly, and efficiently, preventing resource exhaustion and maintaining performance.

Key technical benefits include:

  • Global Coordination: Real-time, cross-node communication for synchronized rate enforcement.
  • Custom Limits: Define thresholds based on user, IP, token, or tenant for granular control.
  • Burst Handling: Smooths legitimate traffic spikes without false positives.
  • Low-Latency Synchronization: Sub-millisecond updates via NATS messaging, ensuring minimal performance impact.
  • Observability: Comprehensive logs and metrics for visibility, tuning, and incident response.
  • Built with VCL: Native integration into Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) using a dedicated VMOD.

This feature is ideal for protecting global APIs with consistent user quotas, maintaining delivery quality in private CDNs against coordinated exploit attempts, and balancing resource use across tenants in large enterprise platforms. It seamlessly integrates with Varnish's Layered Security Suite, complementing WAF, KV Store, Bot-mitigation, Geo-blocking, and more for unified, programmable defense at the edge. 

CDN Router: Smart Traffic Steering for Multi-CDN Environments 

For service providers navigating the complexities of multi-CDN strategies, the new CDN Router from Varnish Software provides a purpose-built, intelligent traffic steering solution. It empowers operators with full control over content delivery paths, crucial for managing growing traffic and ensuring smooth delivery during high-demand events.

The CDN Router dynamically evaluates each user request using a customizable rule set to select the optimal delivery path, returning either an HTTP redirect or a DNS response. It continuously monitors the health, load, and performance of all connected CDNs in real time, enabling adaptive, data-driven routing decisions that enhance user experience and optimize costs. By maximizing private CDN usage and only offloading to external CDNs when necessary, CDN Router can lower delivery costs, increase reliability, and ensure consistent performance during traffic spikes such as live sports or entertainment events.

"As media infrastructure becomes increasingly distributed and complex, our customers demand more sophisticated tools to manage their content delivery infrastructure," said Fredrik Borg, CEO of Varnish Software. "These new Varnish Enterprise features, Global Rate Limiting and CDN Router, are direct responses to those needs. They provide our technical audience with the granular control, real-time intelligence, and robust layered security required to optimize performance, reduce costs, and ensure exceptional user experiences at scale, especially in dynamic environments like live streaming and global API delivery."

Varnish Software invites IBC2025 attendees to learn more about how these innovations can transform their content delivery strategies.

Meet the Team at IBC2025: Varnish Software will be showcasing these new features and more at Hall 5 - Booth 5.A33 at IBC2025 in Amsterdam. Engineers and product leads will be available to discuss caching, delivery, and edge compute, from high-level strategy to low-level architecture.

About Varnish Software: Varnish Software is a global leader in high-performance caching and content delivery. Trusted by leading streaming services and enterprises worldwide, Varnish optimizes the delivery of digital content, APIs, and applications. Its customizable platform empowers businesses to scale efficiently, reduce costs, and deliver outstanding user experiences across video, web, and cloud environments. 

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