Infinispan vs Varnish Cache

Infinispan is a free, open-source distributed in-memory database that combines caching with full-text and vector search. Its search capabilities include distributed vector indexes, kNN similarity queries, semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, and semantic caching. Applications can connect through Hot Rod, REST, Redis, or Memcached, with listed client libraries for Java, Go, JavaScript, C++, .NET, and Python. It can run as an embedded library, standalone server, or container image. Deployment options include a Kubernetes Operator and container images on OpenShift, AWS EC2, Azure, and GCP. Listed cache stores include filesystem, JDBC, SQL, RocksDB, and remote Infinispan clusters. Security features include role- and permission-based access control, security realms, and encryption for inter-cluster traffic and remote endpoints. It supports distributed transactions with optimistic or pessimistic locking, configurable isolation levels, and XA recovery. Native integrations listed include Spring AI, LangChain4j, LangChain, and Quarkus LangChain4j. Infinispan is released under the Apache 2.0 license. Its support policy covers only the latest minor release of a major version, with full, limited, and limited-client support distinctions.

Varnish Cache is a reverse caching proxy for Linux and self-hosted deployments. It serves cached responses from memory and sends other requests to origin servers. Its caching policy is defined in Varnish Configuration Language (VCL), which compiles to native code. Cached objects follow standard HTTP cache headers and leave the cache when they expire. Varnish supports TLS termination within the process and TLS connections to dynamic origin backends. It includes varnishlog for structured logging and varnishstat for metrics, and offers official container images and a Kubernetes Helm chart. Installation guidance covers Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and compatible distributions. Varnish modules add functions callable from VCL. Its security guide describes controls at the command-line, CLI, VCL, and HTTP request levels. The free plan costs nothing. One limit to account for: Varnish avoids caching data when it cannot determine that doing so is safe, and applications may need configuration changes to reach a high cache hit rate.