81–90 of 408 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The long version is, "varying degrees of horror"
The world of economists has no idea how to value technology beyond narrow ad-based business models.
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.
1) You can't export and re-import a config. Just doesn't work.
2) For the Virtual Appliance (not a recommended scenario by F5, to be fair) it's temperamental about its host and doesn't like to be migrated or moved, and will stop functioning.
3) Upgrades sometimes corrupt/wipe parts of the config, sometimes not.
4) Reboots sometimes corrupt/wipe parts of the config, and sometimes changes to the config are not actually applied until a reboot, even though there's no warning of this behavior.
5) Latest release notes for 12.x (last version I worked with) has a lengthy page detailing known issues. https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/releasen... Why? Why are there so many? Why are most of them critical? Many just shouldn't make it to release.
-edit- It's important to be hopeful. I'd rather land on the side of "nginx makes F5 better" rather than "F5 makes nginx worse".
"F5 is committed to continued innovation and increasing investment in the NGINX open source project to empower NGINX’s widespread user communities." from https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-n... what do we know of F5 history in open source?
I think the issue is that there isn't much and certainly nginx could be viewed as competitor to F5. And with everything else going on it's not difficult to imagine that this acquisition isn't a positive sign.
NGinx is first and foremost a web server with excellent controls around caching. Haproxy is a load balancer with some caching as of version 1.9. F5 has always provided a web server in their load balancer via apache, but that is for management of the device itself. It can also serve up static web pages (primarily meant for error and landing pages).
In any case, I'm glad that Nginx is still available for free and the project will continue to have funding in the future from what looks like a cashed-up company. Besides, if it doesn't work out, it can always be foked. Hooray for open source software!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Here's the super versatile Colm Mac explaining what AWS does at L4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gc2DgBqo9U
---
Google has been very open about their network infrastructure, here's a nice summary from 2015: https://ai.googleblog.com/2015/08/pulling-back-curtain-on-go... and not mentioned in that blog... their NetworkLoadBalancer, Maglev: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/google-shares-sof... (AWS equivalent of which would be HyperPlane: https://atscaleconference.com/videos/networking-scale-2018-l... allegedly based on S3's load balancer).
Their main buisness, hardware loadbalancing is rapidly diminishing, so buying in NGINX seems like a sensible move.
After all, its much easier to sell support to people who are actually _using_ your product.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big F5 rig is basically Linux with a CLI/admin interface on top.
It used to actually a BSD rig with a CLI/admin interface on top.
You know, Cisco's IOS XR is built on Linux, but all the real parts are behind their private kernel modules running on ASICs and FPGAs, traffic doesn't even touches the TCP/IP stack of the OS. Cisco ASAs have Celeron/Atom CPUs which obviously couldn't hold the specified loads.
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…
So anyone that refuses to pay for their tools will eventually either loose them, or contend to be happy to use lesser ones.