nginx

How Real-Time APIs Power Our Lives The other day I went to dinner and it made me appreciate the need for fast application programming interfaces (APIs). Confused? Let me explain. To get to dinner I used an app to hail a car from my smartphone. Most of us are familiar with this routine – you open the app, enter your destination, get a ride, step out of the car when you arrive, and pay for your trip automatically using the credit card on file. While you’re waiting for the driver to pick you up, the map updates in real time to indicate the location of the car on approach. But on that day, the app did not update the map. I waited five increasingly uncomfortable minutes, not knowing if a driver was on the way or had even accepted my request. [ more… ]

Application Isolation With NGINX Unit One of the most recent developments in NGINX Unit’s feature set is the support for application isolation, introduced in version 1.11.0 and implemented via Linux namespaces. It was announced just a few weeks ago, and there’s a reason for that: the developer behind the feature, Tiago de Bem Natel de Moura, joined the NGINX Unit team only this summer. Let’s start with a brief recap of Linux namespaces: essentially, they are a kernel mechanism that enables a group of processes to share several types of system resources separately from the resources shared by other groups of processes. The kernel ensures that processes in a namespace access only the resources assigned to that namespace. Although processes in two different namespaces can share some resources, other resources are “invisible” to processes in the other namespace. The types of resources that [ more… ]

The Microservices World of Tomorrow…Today The current IT landscape is littered with buzzwords competing to be the next big trend that will dominate the future of the industry. Digital transformation, multi‑cloud, and predictive analytics are just a few of the topics that analysts proclaim organizations must consider in the near future, if they aren’t already moving in those directions. The truth is that technology is changing so fast that companies need to be extremely agile to stay ahead of the competition, no matter the industry segment. I’d argue that digital transformation involves focusing time and effort on pivoting towards new technology that can improve business outcomes. Microservices is one technology that is leading the march towards digital transformation in the world of application development. Compared to monolithic applications, a microservices architecture combines individual services, each with its own distinct function. [ more… ]