nginx

Real-Time APIs: Stories from the Real World Real‑time APIs have become part of our daily lives. From ordering food from to buying and selling stocks using our mobile phones, many day-to-day activities entail interaction with real‑time APIs. But what does this look like from the perspective of the API publisher? What market demands are driving companies to serve APIs in real time? How are NGINX customers achieving real‑time performance? Let’s look at some examples. Managing API Traffic at Scale for a Microservices‑Based Application Situation African Bank was founded in 2016 in South Africa to provide digital banking services to underserved and rural customers. They built a modern application using microservices from the ground up. Challenge A sophisticated microservices architecture based on a reference architecture from NGINX provided speed-to-market and cost advantages, but introduced complexity around API scalability and inter‑service communication. Solution [ more… ]

Announcing the First NGINX for Good Hackathon This September we will be holding our first NGINX for Good hackathon, and we’re excited. As the name “NGINX for Good” indicates, we’re inviting participants to build a website or application that helps others, with the site or app running on our dynamic application server, NGINX Unit. Perhaps you have an idea to help underprivileged youth, homeless people, or those struggling with the impacts of COVID‑19. Maybe you want to tackle an issue like climate change or social justice. There’s no limit to what you can do, and it can apply at any scale – your local neighborhood or town, a community in need, or people around the world. Who The hackathon is open to anyone who’s developed code, or has a good idea: you don’t have to be an expert developer to participate. Come [ more… ]

Filesystem Isolation in NGINX Unit In November 2019 (which already seems like half a century ago) we announced the addition of namespace isolation to NGINX Unit. Now we’re here to discuss the most recent addition to the isolation mechanism, namely the rootfs option of the isolation object. As mentioned in the blog post announcing NGINX Unit 1.18.0, the rootfs option enables you to designate an arbitrary directory as the filesystem root of an application. Thus, you can configure and run apps as lightweight, on‑demand containers, improving their security, isolating them from each other and the underlying OS, and enhancing the granularity of your infrastructure. Yet, this power doesn’t come without responsibilities. Caveats and Technicalities Perhaps the most important thing to mention is that the rootfs feature is available only on Linux and Unix‑based systems that support bind mounts or the nullfs filesystem. [ more… ]