NGINX | Big leap towards cloud-native application platform from a high-performance web-server

NGINX has recently (Sep 6-8) organized NGINX Conference 2017 in Portland (OR) and would like to highlight some of the key announcements made by NGINX experts in this blog. There is a paradigm shift by NGINX in recent years of offering a comprehensive application platform for Cloud-native Microservices not just a high-performance web server and the same message has been consistently delivered in this conference.

NGINX CTO (Igor Sysoev) announced their aggressive strategy to move beyond web server and offer a unique application platform for cloud-native microservice application platform with the same level of high performance. Also, it is supported by almost all major cloud vendors in the market today - AWS, Azure, OpenShift, GCP, etc.

As per w3tech figures, NGINX is now #1 web-server for 1 million busiest sites in the world. NGINX has achieved this only 5 years and it is a great achievement for opensource community.

Also, a lightweight technology like NGINX to support challenging demands of Microservices (such as monitoring, high performance, hot deployment, lightweight containers, less/zero maintenance, etc.) has been highlighted and a similar approach will be extended to the new application platform.

The overall application platform has 3 key components:

1. NGINX Controller

• Security using RBAC (load balancing config by app owners, self-control).
• Centralized traffic management (routing, push button LB addition, upstream servers management, SSL keys management).
• Centralized monitoring (application metrics, requests per sec, bandwidth usage, consolidated dashboard).

2. NGINX Unit

• A brand new lightweight open-source application server.
• Unique in the industry to support multiple languages in one application server.
• Current beta version supports Python, PHP & Go. Java & NodeJs support to be available soon.

3. NGINX/NGINX Plus Web Server

• High-performance web server, which is the backbone of the entire application platform.

In conclusion, big aspirations by NGINX as a company to move forward aggressively towards establishing themselves as a cloud-native platform. Keep watching NGINX!!

References:

• NGINX Application Platform - https://www.nginx.com/blog/introducing-nginx-application-platform
• NGINX Unit - https://www.nginx.com/products/nginx-unit/