Varnish Cache 5.0

As someone who has never used Varnish but has used Nginx's cache to some degree... whats the benefit of placing varnish in the middle vs going with Nginx?

Do I understand this right? It supports HTTP/2, but doesn't support HTTPS. Therefore it supports HTTP/2 in a mostly unusable form, because browser vendors (for good reasons) decided to support HTTP/2 only over HTTPS.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nginx.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;maximizing-drupal-8-performance-nginx-part-ii-caching-load-balancing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nginx.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;maximizing-drupal-8-performance-n...</a><p>In the BBC’s testing, they found that with NGINX as a drop-in replacement for Varnish, they saw five times more throughput.

Historically, PHK was a very vocal criticizer of SPDY and HTTP&#x2F;2: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.varnish-cache.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;trunk&#x2F;phk&#x2F;http20.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.varnish-cache.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;trunk&#x2F;phk&#x2F;http20.html</a><p>Of course he relented and implemented SPDY and HTTP&#x2F;2 anyway.<p>But all the same I can&#x27;t help but feel that his original criticsm still stands, and what we need is a rethink of e.g. cookies.

It&#x27;s always good to see new stuff coming out for Varnish. Do these changes warrant a major jump in release numbers especially when HTTP&#x2F;2 support (biggest feature) is experimental?<p>Anyway, I&#x27;m looking forward to testing it out and integrating v5 with Cachoid ( shameful plug: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cachoid.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cachoid.com&#x2F;</a> ).

From the release notes <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;varnish.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;5.0&#x2F;whats-new&#x2F;relnote-5.0.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;varnish.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;5.0&#x2F;whats-new&#x2F;relnote-5.0.html</a> &quot;It is important that people understand that Free and Open Source Software isn&#x27;t the same as gratis software: Somebody has to pay the developers mortgages and student loans.&quot;<p>Varnish is an excellent piece of software, but I thought it was totally funded by the commercial side varnish software. How does this model work? It seems odd to ask for donations while also selling an expensive supported version?