nginx

Active or Passive Health Checks: Which Is Right for You? Just as regular check‑ups with a doctor are an important part of staying healthy, regular checks on the health of your apps are critical for reliable performance. When reverse proxying and load balancing traffic, NGINX uses passive health checks to shield your application users from outages by automatically diverting traffic away from servers that don’t respond to requests. NGINX Plus adds active health checks, sending special probes that can detect unhealthy servers even before they fail to process a request. Which type of health check makes sense for your applications? In this post, we give you the info you need to make that decision. What Is a Health Check? In the most basic sense, a health check is a method for determining whether a server is able to handle traffic. NGINX [ more… ]

Making Better Decisions with Deep Service Insight from NGINX Ingress Controller We released version 3.0 of NGINX Ingress Controller in January 2023 with a host of significant new features and enhanced functionality. One new feature we believe you’ll find particularly valuable is Deep Service Insight, available with the NGINX Plus edition of NGINX Ingress Controller. Deep Service Insight addresses a limitation that hinders optimal functioning when a routing decision system such as a load balancer sits in front of one or more Kubernetes clusters – namely, that the system has no access to information about the health of services running in the clusters. This prevents it from routing traffic only to healthy pods, which potentially exposes your users to outages and errors like 404 and 500. Deep Service Insight eliminates that problem by exposing the health status of backend service pods (as collected by NGINX Ingress [ more… ]

Managing Kubernetes Cost and Performance with Kubecost and NGINX Balancing cost and risk is top of mind for enterprises today. But without sufficient visibility, it is impossible to know if resources are being used effectively or consistently. Kubernetes enables complex deployments of containerized workloads, which are often transient and consume variable amounts of cluster resources. That makes cloud environments a great fit for Kubernetes, because they offer pricing models where you only pay for what you use, instead of having to overprovision in anticipation of peak loads. Of course, cloud vendors charge a premium for that convenience. What if you could unlock the dynamic load balancing of public cloud, without the cost? And what if you could use the same solution for your on‑premises and public cloud deployments? Now you can. Kubecost and NGINX are helping Kubernetes users reduce complexity [ more… ]

Accelerating DDoS Mitigation with eBPF in F5 NGINX App Protect DoS The battle against DDoS attacks continues to transform. In the 2023 DDoS Attack Trends report, F5 Labs analyzed three years of recent data about distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and found that while attackers still use complex multi‑vector DDoS attacks, they have also shifted to launching more purely application‑layer (Layer 7) attacks. In 2022 alone, the prevalence of Layer 7 attacks grew by 165%. Counts of DDoS attack types, 2020–2022, showing a large increase in the number of application attacks and corresponding reduction in volumetric and multi‑vector attacks. Typically, attackers pursue the easiest path to achieve their goal, whether that means preventing operations of a website or extortion of a target. This rise in Layer 7 attacks may be an indication that it is becoming harder to launch a DDoS attack solely by using a volumetric or [ more… ]