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Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

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Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#101

Post by geodel »

pjmlp wrote: post #90
yingw787 wrote: post #50

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…

What happened is the realisation that FOSS developers also have to pay their bills and idealism only takes so far. So anyone that refuses to pay for their tools will eventually either loose them, or contend to be happy to use lesser ones.

Exactly right. Its amazing thing in software industry that developers want to be highly paid themselves along with free work from other software developers.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#102

Post by greglindahl »

jfindley wrote: post #32
raiyu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could it, really? I know that nginx has some builtin load balancing, but unless it's vastly vastly changed in the past few years, it's still a LONG way behind haproxy for load balancing. nginx is an excellent high performance webserver, which is something F5 don't really have. It is (or was, at least) at best a mediocre load balancer, with all sorts of limitations at the sort of scales you'd usually use an F5 box for…

nginx's worse-than-F5-and-haproxy load balancing was great for where I was using it. And from all reports, F5 would have required a full engineer to do configuration, compared to about 1/4 of an engineer for nginx.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#103

Post by the_common_man »

user5994461 wrote: post #99
westoque wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Hashicorp[0] has nailed down the open source enterprise model perfectly. Where they make open source software for enterprise and provide services to support. [0]: https://www.hashicorp.com

They barely have any revenue and they're struggling. It's probably one of the next companies to be acquired in the coming years.

I have always wondered what this enterprise support means? So if a big company starts using vagrant, they would dole out 100k for a support contract? I find this hard to believe but what do I know.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#104

Post by wolco »

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?

Life is nicer in many ways under apache.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#105

Post by [deleted] »

c0l0 wrote: post #49

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…

[deleted]

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#106

Post by Diederich »

gonzo wrote: post #96
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.

And that userspace is based on a really old version of FreeBSD. Or maybe that’s Citrix.

Recent F5 systems are running CentOS 6.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#107

Post by crankylinuxuser »

astrodust wrote: post #17
X-Istence wrote: post #10

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.

The control plane can be a raspberry pi. Its what allows you to modify the rules how you route. Its the interface.

The data plane is where you have high speed logic and data traveling. That's where you do the multiple 100GBps software defined networking, and its crazy fast chips doing it.

And the control plane has interconnects to program the data plane chips to the rules you want. So the data never hits the control plane at all. Its kind of like a water faucet where the knob doesn't touch the water but controls the floodgates.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#108

Post by ChristianGeek »

pjmlp wrote: post #90
yingw787 wrote: post #50

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…

What happened is the realisation that FOSS developers also have to pay their bills and idealism only takes so far. So anyone that refuses to pay for their tools will eventually either loose them, or contend to be happy to use lesser ones.

“Loose” is the opposite of “tight,” “lose” is the opposite of “find.” Easy to remember because the opposites have the same number of letters.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#109

Post by tehbeard »

wskinner wrote: post #65
yingw787 wrote: post #50

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…

My understanding is that Google has recently deviated from this strategy. The result of the strategy you mention is that the industry standardized on other companies' implementation of ideas that came from Google: Hadoop (MapReduce), HDFS (GFS), ZooKeeper (Chubby, and more. For examples of newer open source projects that see more active maintenance from Google, see Kubernetes and TensorFlow.

Does that deviation lineup with Google's entry into offering cloud computing?

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#110

Post by coder543 »

wolco wrote: post #104
s_kilk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Life is nicer in many ways under apache.

What are some of these "many ways"? because I strongly favor the quality of life under nginx over that of apache. For smaller projects, these days I reach for Caddy which is even more pleasant to use than nginx.
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