Rewind 2019: Highlights from the NGINX Blog
2019 has been a truly fascinating and exciting year for NGINX, our customers, our partners, and our community. As we prepare to take a break from our hard work over the holiday season, here is a look back on some of our top moments from the last 12 months, as voted for by our readers.
NGINX Becomes Part of F5
Unsurprising to those who are already aware by now, the news that F5 Networks acquired NGINX was a massive moment for us this year, heralding a new era for both parties as well as their respective customers and communities. NGINX’s Gus Robertson published a blog post to confirm our commitment to existing open-source projects and commercial products, as well as plans to accelerate the development of NGINX Controller.
Robinson also wrote that he firmly believes in the common goal of both entities and that the future looked bright for NGINX as part of the new F5 family:
“It’s a story where the sum is greater than the individual parts. Enterprises are undergoing digital transformation. Their applications are their business. Combined, F5 and NGINX provide a new, end-to-end set of application offerings that bridge the divide between NetOps and DevOps. The result? Customers can spend more time focused on their apps, and less time worrying about the underlying infrastructure.”
F5’s commitment to NGINX was shown most of all at NGINX Conf which took place in Seattle, WA, back in September. It was there that F5 CEO, François Locoh-Donou, gave his keynote speech to share his thoughts on why F5 acquired NGINX, and how NGINX fits into F5’s mission and vision.
Product Updates for OSS & NGINX Plus
Shortly after the news of our acquisition broke, we reaffirmed our commitment to NGINX open source technology, developers, and our community. We later proved that commitment throughout 2019, as NGINX continued to focus on our commercial and open source products, with many updates proving themselves well received by our customers and community alike.
NGINX Plus Now at R20
NGINX Plus remains the only all-in-one load balancer, content cache, web server, and API gateway. Based on NGINX Open Source, NGINX Plus includes exclusive enhanced features and award‑winning support, and many key features were included in our latest releases, including:
- Real‑time monitoring and logging of rate‑limited traffic (R20)
- Prefix matching in the key‑value store (R20)
- Dry‑run mode for testing rate limits (R19)
- Dynamic bandwidth control (R19)
- Security improvements for HTTP/2 (R20)
NGINX 1.16 and 1.17 Released
In addition to our NGINX Plus releases, we also released NGINX 1.16 and 1.17, the latter of which now includes support for variables in bandwidth‑limiting configurations with the limit_rate directive and also allows the include directive to be used in all configuration contexts, even inside an if block.
Development has also started on support for QUIC and HTTP/3 – the next significant update to the transport protocols that will deliver websites, applications, and APIs. This is a significant undertaking, likely to arrive during the NGINX 1.17 development cycle.
Technical Deep-Dives Galore
Popular highlights from this year’s blogroll didn’t just include company news or product release notes, but also helpful technical articles from many of our leading figures. Among these updates included a blend of performance comparisons and experimental tests, such as:
- A Regular Expression Tester for NGINX and NGINX Plus
- Validating OAuth 2.0 Access Tokens with NGINX and NGINX Plus
- Testing the Performance of the NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes
Strategic Explorations
It’s often difficult to separate advice of real benefit from industry noise, especially if many providers are trying to push their own version of the same message. That’s why we were happy to break away from such habits, with a selection of opinion pieces and analysis articles on key topics. Among these, we published Do You Really Need Different Kinds of API Gateways? (Hint: No!) which built upon our general availability release of the API Management Module for NGINX Controller. We also published a thought-provoking piece from Owen Garrett that defies expectations: Do I Need a Service Mesh?.
Without a doubt, it has been an exciting year for us at NGINX, and we can’t wait to see what 2020 has in store for our colleagues, teams, partners, and most of all, you. Until then, we wish our customers, partners, and open source community the very best for the holiday season, and we look forward to seeing you in the new year!
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