We have improved significantly in the last few years, delivering much more content for every watt of energy consumed by hardware processes. This is good news for our customers, with lower hardware and energy costs when delivering content to their audience. The NUMA-aware version of Varnish Enterprise 6 is a major milestone in this respect, as it processes memory access locally for more efficient I/O performance. It means we’re able to deliver much, much more, for much, much less, and the latest benchmarks set during our ongoing collaboration with Intel have seen Varnish delivering video at over 500Gbps per server. As top-level partners in the Titanium tier of the Intel Network Builders Winners’ Circle, we’re continuing to work alongside Intel to ensure hardware and software develop in alignment and produce the efficiencies we look for when deploying our software.

As a caching software provider, Varnish Software is in a position to make valuable contributions towards sustainability.
Caching is by definition about recycling. Once a server has processed an object, a task which requires energy, our technology can recycle that object thousands, maybe even millions, of times. This significantly decreases the amount of work a backend server needs to do in order to deliver content to users. Often, caching even means a customer can reduce their infrastructure footprint as a whole: fewer servers are required to reach their audience. The more performant our technology is, the lower the resources required for our customers to deliver their content, and we have a responsibility to make this happen, and improve efficiency over time

We are partnering with academia on a project to measure the power consumption and CO2 emissions of HTTP servers on which Varnish is deployed. We are investigating how to measure the impact of caching technology on reducing carbon footprint. To this end, we created tools to measure power consumption (CO2 emissions) and transmitted data. The results
of the lab tests show that power consumption and therefore emissions can be reduced with improved technology. You can read more about our work with KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm here. We can still do better, and have just extended and strengthened our partnership with the university.

We are an active founding member of Greening of Streaming (GoS) since its inception in 2021. Greening of Streaming is a trade association that brings together partners from across the global streaming industry in order to collaborate and address growing concerns about the impact of the streaming sector on the environment. The aim is to develop technology solutions that deliver excellent streaming experiences without wasting energy.

The focus is on power efficiency and long-term sustainability among streaming infrastructure and technology providers, and importantly, GoS committed to ‘no greenwashing.’ It’s about engineering collaboration and commitments! Its members, such as Akamai, Intel and Broadpeak, include organizations from across the streaming world, such as major CDN providers, hardware manufacturers and media players.

Collaboration is one of Varnish’s core values. Meeting in person for our global teams facilitates collaboration, at the same time Varnish also takes sustainability seriously. We have adjusted our travel policy with simple guidelines like considering taking the train when possible or simply choosing direct flights over flights with stopovers. But we can do better: Varnish is
committed to offsetting emissions through sustainable environmental projects.

Sustainability is not a project or an activity, our ambition is for it to be at the heart of everything we do. This requires awareness in all areas of the company so that we can make conscious decisions. For this reason, we have rolled out an e-learning employee training program that provides basic instruction in how to act sustainably in everyday life. This will be followed by local actions at our global sites so that we can make small steps forward in all regions. We have also created an internal communication platform, our Slack channel #wecandobetter where colleagues can discuss topics and ideas.

We will continue to address the issue proactively in the future. For the next two years, we will further develop our core Varnish technology to offer even more efficient and sustainable software.

We will continue to expand and strengthen our partnerships in the area of sustainability, such as with the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and the Greening of Streaming alliance.

Internally, we will promote numerous activities in different departments and locations of our company, especially to encourage our employees at Varnish to contribute together. 

Our employees are encouraged to initiate new activities in order to enhance our commitment to achieve sustainable.