Top 5 NGINX Blog Posts of 2017 – R12, Microservices, and More

2017-12-28 KENNETH 0

Top 5 NGINX Blog Posts of 2017 – R12, Microservices, and More neophile (n): an enthusiast for what is new or novel What was most popular in the NGINX blog this year? Looking at our top blog posts, it looks like new NGINX Plus releases, microservices, security, and load balancing are all big hits, along with the NGINX Application Platform. 1. NGINX Release 12 The NGINX Plus R12 release was packed with features, including the general availability (GA) release of nginScript, enhanced caching, health check improvements, new statistics for reporting, and the ability to script configuration pushes to additional servers. The blog post was our #1 post of the year, viewed twice as many times as the next blog post on the list. Configuration changes are pushed from the master to the peers Four other release or launch blog posts [ more… ]

Autoscaling and Orchestration with NGINX Plus and Chef

2017-12-22 KENNETH 0

Autoscaling and Orchestration with NGINX Plus and Chef Introduction There are many solutions for handling autoscaling in cloud environments, but they’re usually dependent on the specific infrastructure of a given cloud provider. Leveraging the flexibility of NGINX Plus with the functionality of Chef, we can build an autoscaling system that can be used on most cloud providers. Chef has a tool, knife, which you can use at the command line to act on objects such as cookbooks, nodes, data bags, and more. Knife plugins help you extend knife. So we use knife plugins to help abstract out functionality specific to one specific cloud, enabling knife commands to work the same way across clouds. Requirements For this setup, we’ll be leveraging our NGINX Chef cookbook. The installation and a basic overview of this cookbook can be found here. Also, we’ll be utilizing [ more… ]

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Performance Tuning – Tips & Tricks

2017-12-19 KENNETH 0

Performance Tuning – Tips & Tricks Over the past few years, I’ve worked with a handful of partners where NGINX Plus performance was their primary concern. The conversation typically starts with challenges on their end hitting our published performance benchmarks. The challenge usually comes from the partner jumping straight to a fixed use case, such as using their existing SSL keys or targeting very large file payloads, and then seeing sub-par performance from NGINX Plus. To a certain degree, this is expected behavior. I always like to explain to partners that as a software component, NGINX Plus can run at near line-rate speeds on any hardware that’s available to us when dealing with the most basic HTTP use case. In order to hit our published numbers with specific use cases, though, often NGINX Plus benefits from NGINX configuration, low-level OS, [ more… ]

NGINX Unit, Three Months In: Progress and Next Steps

2017-12-13 KENNETH 0

NGINX Unit, Three Months In: Progress and Next Steps Three months ago, we released the first beta version of NGINX Unit, a new dynamic server for web applications. See our initial description of Unit, the announcement blog post, the in-depth demo, and our Unit webinar. The announcement of Unit became the top story on Hacker News. The code continues to receive attention on GitHub, and Unit’s features and architecture spawned numerous discussion threads on Facebook, Twitter, and other networks. We invite you to download Unit packages or compile it yourself, to try it, and to join the discussion. To share our progress since the initial beta release, in this blog post, I’ll summarize the last three months of engineering work, then describe our plans for future features and for production readiness. Unit running multiple application languages and versions Vision We [ more… ]

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Why the Fall of Net Neutrality Could Smother Innovation

2017-12-13 KENNETH 0

Why the Fall of Net Neutrality Could Smother Innovation Our current digital age was built on the creativity inspired by a free and open Internet. The long‑term consequences of repealing it may jeopardize that creativity. The Internet is a utility that can and should be open to the world’s innovators. We are possibly living in the final days of net neutrality. There are countless articles and analyses out there examining exactly which regulations are changing and what the December 14 vote means for the Internet, but that’s only part of the story. What’s more striking to me is the enduring legacy these changes may have on the engineers and entrepreneurs of tomorrow, the next generation of creators building a connected world we haven’t dreamed up yet. There was much fanfare recently when a ZDNet article argued that the FCC’s proposed changes [ more… ]