nginx

Making Microservices More Resilient with Chaos Engineering Microservices have become a very popular pattern for teams that develop and deploy services. Using microservices gives developers a smaller, more focused codebase to work with, and more independence in when and how they deploy their service. These are big advantages over using a monolith. There is no such thing as a free lunch, however. Complexity doesn’t disappear when you transition from monolith to microservices – it just shifts around a bit. Development of an indivdual microservice is easier because of the smaller codebase, but operating microservices in production can become exponentially more complex. There are likely many more hosts and/or containers running in a system built with microservices – more load balancers, more firewall rules, etc. You might be using NGINX for different purposes (web serving, reverse proxying, load balancing) for different microservices. As [ more… ]

DevOps in Practice: Moving NGINX Controller Development to GitLab CI When F5’s acquisition of NGINX was finalized in May of this year, one of the first priorities for Engineering was to integrate the control‑plane development teams and adopt a common set of tools. In this post, I describe the changes we made to our code repository, development pipeline, and artifact storage. Before the acquisition, the NGINX Controller team’s tool suite included GitHub for the code repo, Jenkins for the development pipeline, and Nexus Repository Manager OSS, Docker Registry, and Amazon S3 for artifact storage. The control‑plane team at F5 was using GitLab with its built‑in continuous integration feature (GitLab CI) for the code repo and pipeline, and JFrog Artifactory for all artifacts. We saw lots of value in adopting the F5 tech stack for the control‑plane team as a whole. First, it’s simpler than the [ more… ]

Reflections on #NGINXConf 2019 It was a great privilege for me to fly to Seattle a couple of weeks ago and see colleagues, partners, customers, and community users coming together for NGINX Conf 2019: two jam‑packed days of keynotes and breakout sessions at the beautiful Sheraton Grand Seattle hotel. I joined NGINX in November 2018, and had heard about Conf since the start. Thankfully, I didn’t miss out on the fun this year, and even got interviewed about my excitement around the event! Now that it’s done for another year, I’m back in our EMEA offices in Cork Ireland, and I’ve had some time to think about what I enjoyed the most. Evolving Apps, Evolving Cultures One of the major themes from this year’s Conf was the concept of applications as living organisms, as explained by Gus Robertson in his Day 1 keynote and [ more… ]

Digital Transformation in a New Era of Application Delivery Application development and delivery has been changing drastically in the last number of years. The growth of public cloud is a large catalyst for this change. Public cloud provides the ability to provision and scale infrastructure on demand, with almost limitless possibilities for distributing services across all corners of the world. These changes have not only caused a shift in how applications are developed, but in the approach to application delivery. The legacy approach to application development typically involves hosting your own data center or building an application‑centric infrastructure within a colocation facility. Many organizations distribute their infrastructure across numerous physical locations, whether it be a set of regional offices well‑disposed to running IT infrastructure or a group of colocations strategically located near a user base. In order to provide the [ more… ]