Making life easier for the 2.2 million Web sites that deploy the Varnish Cache HTTP engine is the point of Hitch from Varnish Software. The recently updated Hitch is a scalable, open-source network proxy designed to handle tens of thousands of connections on multicore machines efficiently. Maker Varnish describes Hitch's benefits as easy to configure, a low memory footprint and the ideal way of terminating client-side SSL/TLS for Varnish. The deployment process for Varnish Cache is streamlined by the support for the PROXY protocol, which lets Varnish consider the original client's endpoints as if there were no TLS proxy in between.

Hitch is tested on Linux, but works on other *nixes as well. Hitch's features include support for TLS1.0-1.2; SNI, with and without wild-card certificates; support for HAProxy's PROXY protocol; seamless configuration run-time reload support and performance up to 15,000 listening sockets and 500,000 certificates.