Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks • Hacker News Board

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#41

Post by PaulBGD_ » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:03 PM UTC

s_kilk wrote: post #29

clinta wrote: post #9

I'm nervous about what this means for the future of nginx's built in load balancing. That's been an important and rock-solid part of my infrastructure.

Throwing out a question to the room: if the worst happens and Nginx gets butchered, would it be so bad to go back to using Apache? I've never used it really, everything I've done has been Nginx, but is there some technical reason why Apache wouldn't be a fine fallback option for an open-source server?

The main reason I switched to nginx from apache years ago was due to configuration, which was much nicer from my side. If I was to switch away from nginx because something happened, I'd probably find something similar configuration and speed wise. Caddy looks nice.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#42

Post by gorkish » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:04 PM UTC

buryat wrote: post #27

what are some good alternatives to nginx?

Nginx does a lot of things today that the erstwhile notion of a 'web server' would never have been tasked to to.

So depending on what you are doing, varnish, lighttpd, apache, or haproxy (and likely more) might be used alone or in combination to match functionality.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#43

Post by mustardo » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

s_kilk wrote: post #29

clinta wrote: post #9

I'm nervous about what this means for the future of nginx's built in load balancing. That's been an important and rock-solid part of my infrastructure.

Throwing out a question to the room: if the worst happens and Nginx gets butchered, would it be so bad to go back to using Apache? I've never used it really, everything I've done has been Nginx, but is there some technical reason why Apache wouldn't be a fine fallback option for an open-source server?

Yea Apache would be fine for 99% of people those that are pushing a huge number of requests might struggle but there is haproxy amongst others as alternatives

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#44

Post by gbuk2013 » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #23

gbuk2013 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work for F5.) This is not true - Linux is really just userspace to run our own data-plane code.

Serious question: what does it actually do in non-corp speak, though?

Pretty much everything. :)

L4-L7 load balancing, distributed DNS, SSL offload, WAF, DPI, data centre firewall and other things. With a nice WebUI to configure all that.

The Tcl iRules allow you to hook into pretty much any stage of the request or the response L4-L7 at FPGA speeds to do whatever you wanted to the request / response data.

It's a very powerful product.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#45

Post by libria » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

buryat wrote: post #27

what are some good alternatives to nginx?

Envoy https://www.envoyproxy.io/

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#46

Post by rhacker » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:06 PM UTC

joshAg wrote: post #11

X-Istence wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big F5 rig is basically Linux with a CLI/admin interface on top.

It's way more than that. Yeah the base OS on the machine is Linux, but there's a lot of extra stuff they do all the way down to the hardware layer.

So what does the likes of AWS (for example) use for load balancing for data coming into its various private clouds... f5s?

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#47

Post by joshAg » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:06 PM UTC

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #23

gbuk2013 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I work for F5.) This is not true - Linux is really just userspace to run our own data-plane code.

Serious question: what does it actually do in non-corp speak, though?

It's an inline swiss-army-network appliance that can do a fuckton of things at the speed of packets or nearly so up to 100Gbs.

load balancing? check.

stateful load balancing? check.

ssl-termination? check.

HSM-enabled ssl-termination? check.

hardware accelerated ssl-termination? check.

firewall? check.

NG firewall? check.

compiled Lua/tcl (i forget which) scripts so you can program something insanely complicated? check.

SAML? check.

ISP sized NATs? check.

etc.

Plus, way more configuration knobs and options than you'd ever want at each network layer. Like, come up with a load balancing scheme where Tls1.2 clients using Poly1305-chacha20 get sent to a specific pool of servers while everything else goes to another pool, except for clients trying to use QUIC and who are coming from a specific range of IP. They go to another set of servers.

Maybe a better way to think of it is that it's a single device for tweaking anything L3-L7 for your server and parts of your network.

(used to work for f5, too, but i'm not sure how specific i can get with the nda).

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#48

Post by mikkom » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

rsp1984 wrote: post #24

miguelmota wrote: post #13

Acquired for $670 million https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-n...

Plenty of money for (what I understand) essentially a service company.

Service company with very valuable IPR..

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#49

Post by c0l0 » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

I guess that signals it's time for nginx users to check out possible alternatives - just in case, if things turn out for the worse.

I can recommend having a look at https://varnish-cache.org/ - while its performance might not be 100% up to par with nginx in some (very, very high-end) scenarios, it has many other fortes that nginx (at least in its FOSS release version; I've never used nginx plus) just cannot match in my experience. Having seen `varnishlog` and `varnishtest` in action alone are worth spending a day or two exploring it.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#50

Post by yingw787 » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

So...what is the future of enterprise open source? Is there a future for enterprise open source?

If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. If you mix in proprietary licenses to protect yourself, AWS forks your core, adds in open-source licensed clients, then runs you into the ground (and you lose open-source contributors/supporters as a bonus who may fork your core themselves).

I remember from a undergrad class reading Google's system design papers, that they publish only the top-level architecture for core systems they use, and only after 3-5 years of use when they have moved on to a better system. After all this (Docker/Redis/Elastic/Nginx), I think that might be the best path forward. You can provide the benefits of open-source and recognition for the architects, but not lose your competitive advantage. Open-sourcing your core product seems too idealistic.