NGINX Hybrid Application Delivery Controller Platform improves API management, manages microservices and much more!

“Technology is front and center in every business strategy, and enterprises of all sizes and in all industries must embrace digital to attract, retain, and enrich customers,”
-Gus Robertson, CEO, NGINX

At the NGINX Conf 2018, the NGINX team has announced enhancements to its Application Platform that will serve as a common framework across monolithic and microservices based applications. The upgrade comes with 3 new releases; NGINX Plus, NGINX Controller, and NGINX Unit, which have been engineered to provide a built-in service mesh for managing microservices and an integrated application programming interface (API) management platform. They also maintain the traditional load balancing capabilities and a web application firewall (WAF).

An application delivery controller (ADC) is used to improve the performance of web applications. The ADC acts as a mediator between web and application servers and their clients. It transfers requests and responses between them while enhancing performance using processes like load balancing, caching, compression, and offloading of SSL processing.
The main aim of re-architecting NGINX’s platform and launching new updates was to provide a more comprehensive approach to integrating load balancing, service mesh technologies, and API management. This was to be done leveraging the modular architecture of the NGINX controller.

Here is a gist of the three new NGINX product releases:

#1 NGINX Controller 2.0

This controller is an upgrade on the NGINX Controller 1.0 that was launched in June of 2018. It was introduced with centralized management, monitoring, and analytics for NGINX Plus load balancers. Now, NGINX Controller 2.0 brings advanced NGINX Plus configuration. This includes version control, diffing, reverting and many more features.
It also includes an all-newAPI Management Module which manages the NGINX Plus as an API gateway. Besides this, the controller will also include a future Service Mesh Module.

#2 NGINX Plus R16

The R16 comes with dynamic clustering. It has a clustered state sharing and key-value stores for global rate limiting and DDoS mitigation. It also comes with load balancing algorithms for Kubernetes and microservices, enhanced UDP for VoIP and VDI, and AWS PrivateLink integration.

#3 NGINX Unit 1.4

This unit improves security and language support while providing support for TLS. It also adds JavaScript with Node.js to extend existing Go, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby language support.
Enterprises can now use the NGINX Application Platform to function as a Dynamic Application Gateway and a Dynamic Application Infrastructure. NGINX Plus and NGINX are used by popular, high-traffic sites such as Dropbox, Netflix, and Zynga. More than 319 million websites worldwide rely on NGINX Plus and NGINX application delivery platforms.

To know more about this announcement, head over to DevOps.com

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