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Defining a Modern App

2021-10-07 KENNETH 0

Defining a Modern App Developers, architects, and DevOps engineers are no longer satisfied with the status quo when it comes to designing and building applications. We know this because we talk to them all the time. They’re tired of the challenges in porting applications from one cloud to another. They’ve experienced the intense pressure of spinning up additional compute infrastructure quickly to meet unexpected demand. They’ve struggled to put the right assets in place after suffering a major failure or outage. Basically, they are tired of the stress and hassles of legacy application architectures. What we’ve heard over and over again from customers and community members is that they want to build “modern apps.” The term is broad enough to mean different things to different people, so we asked our Dev and DevOps colleagues what a modern app means to [ more… ]

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Announcing NGINX Plus R25

2021-09-28 KENNETH 0

Announcing NGINX Plus R25 We’re happy to announce the availability of NGINX Plus Release 25 (R25). Based on NGINX Open Source, NGINX Plus is the only all-in-one software web server, load balancer, reverse proxy, content cache, and API gateway. Attention: NGINX App Protect Customers NGINX Plus R25 is not backward compatible with NGINX App Protect 3.5 (the current version) and earlier. To prevent upgrade failures, the NGINX Plus R25 package is not currently available from the NGINX Plus software repository. Customers with a subscription for NGINX App Protect who wish to obtain NGINX Plus R25 (without App Protect) may do so from MyF5. NGINX App Protect 3.6 (scheduled for 13 October 2021) will provide support for NGINX Plus R25. New features in NGINX Plus R25 include: Additional, more advanced JSON Web Token use cases – NGINX Plus R25 builds on the support for encrypted JSON [ more… ]

A Guide to Choosing an Ingress Controller, Part 4: NGINX Ingress Controller Options

2021-09-28 KENNETH 0

A Guide to Choosing an Ingress Controller, Part 4: NGINX Ingress Controller Options This is the third blog post in our series on how to choose a Kubernetes Ingress controller. How to Choose a Kubernetes Ingress Controller, Part 1: Identify Your Requirements How to Choose a Kubernetes Ingress Controller, Part 2: Risks and Future-Proofing How to Choose a Kubernetes Ingress Controller, Part 3: Open Source vs. Default vs. Commercial How to Choose a Kubernetes Ingress Controller, Part 4: NGINX Ingress Controller Options (this post) According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) Survey 2020, NGINX is the most commonly used data plane in Ingress controllers for Kubernetes – but did you know there’s more than one “NGINX Ingress Controller”? A previous version of this blog, published in 2018 under the title Wait, Which NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes Am I Using?, was prompted by a conversation with [ more… ]

How to Visualize NGINX Plus with Prometheus and Grafana

2021-09-24 KENNETH 0

How to Visualize NGINX Plus with Prometheus and Grafana As we discussed in How to Improve Visibility in Kubernetes, one of the top challenges for app development and delivery teams is getting insight into app performance, security, and availability. These insights help teams troubleshoot problems quickly and proactively prepare for traffic spikes. Traffic management tools – such as load balancers, reverse proxies, API gateways, and Ingress controllers – generate a wealth of information about your app and infrastructure health. You can track these valuable metrics in real time on the NGINX Plus dashboard, and NGINX Plus can also feed metrics to third‑party monitoring tools to give you extra insight from visualizations of performance over time. Two of the most popular tools work together to give you these time‑series graphs: Prometheus – An open source project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) for monitoring and [ more… ]

Implementing OpenID Connect Authentication for Kubernetes with Okta and NGINX Ingress Controller

2021-09-23 KENNETH 0

Implementing OpenID Connect Authentication for Kubernetes with Okta and NGINX Ingress Controller We’ve written many times about how important it is to secure your apps and APIs in today’s climate of ransomware and bot‑driven attacks. Along with mechanisms like web application firewall (WAF), authenticating user identities and enforcing authorization controls are important ways to protect your business applications. The most direct way to implement authentication and authorization is in the applications themselves. While this can work when your user base is small and your app doesn’t require frequent updates, it quickly becomes untenable at scale. For one thing, when your users have to remember a different account name and password for each of many apps, they’re often greeted with frustrating “incorrect username or password” messages when trying to log in, leading them to resort to insecure solutions like easily guessed [ more… ]