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Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

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Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#141
post #114

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

I love Hashicorp products, however, all of their pricing behind "Contact Sales" is a major turn off. Why? I don't want to be the subject of a constant dripping of emails, calls, and missings from a sales person who is constant to get their numbers and puts me in their sales automation pipeline. Give me a ballpark estimate, I can go to whomever is needed, and we can go from there: I've never ran into a case where "I d…

I agree, but since so many companies still do this, the math must work out such that having sales staff work out the prices results in higher profits even including lost sales to people like yourself who won't jump through the hoops.

The polar opposite of this would be Atlassian, who publishes every price and doesn't negotiate at all. At least it's easy to deal with...

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. At least our company won't touch GPL code; as one colleague described to me, if you violate a proprietary license, a company will come after you for money, while violating a GPL license gets the EFF involved who will come after you for your source code. I'm still wary, though. I could imagine if the resultant fines or source code releases from violating a GPL license weren't a strong enough deterrent, you coul…

The only claimants to your source code are those to whom you've distributed binaries built from GPL sources. Anyone else can pound sand.

That's true, but GGP comment mentioned AGPL presumably for a reason :)

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#143

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…

There absolutely is a future for enterprise open source. It's not through direct monetization, but rather driving down the price of complements for existing product lines.

Running a service on AWS requires two goods. High-margin computing resources that Amazon really wants to sell, and the software to turn those computing resources into solutions to business problems. Solving the business problems has a fixed dollar amount to be split between the two, so the cheaper the software is the more money Amazon's customers can afford to spend on AWS.

So the final equilibrium is that Amazon ends up funding open-source solutions, and profits off it from increased AWS margins.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#144
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Hashicorp products, however, all of their pricing behind "Contact Sales" is a major turn off. Why? I don't want to be the subject of a constant dripping of emails, calls, and missings from a sales person who is constant to get their numbers and puts me in their sales automation pipeline. Give me a ballpark estimate, I can go to whomever is needed, and we can go from there: I've never ran into a case where "I d…

I agree, but since so many companies still do this, the math must work out such that having sales staff work out the prices results in higher profits even including lost sales to people like yourself who won't jump through the hoops. The polar opposite of this would be Atlassian, who publishes every price and doesn't negotiate at all. At least it's easy to deal with...

It is quite hard to A/B test. And the sales people making the bonus is often part of setting the strategy.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#145

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…

I think the issue here is that you're viewing the merit of open-source entirely based on the immediate profitability of the software.

The benefits of FOSS are largely non-monetary. I know as entrepreneurs and professionals that might be a hard line-of-thought to default to, but I think it is extremely short-sighted (and borderline ignorant) to judge the merits of free software by its profitability.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#146

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 is the corporate internet. The internet exists in the box, as far as your employees / security model are concerned. (as far as the security model is concerned, There Are Always Bugs - this is a feature).

If it weren't for the need for remote backups, email and such would be hosted there as well, and you could run a company on one of these with no access to the public internet at all. Accounting, finance, etc: all of it.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#147
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…

Does varnish support SSL? Last I checked, I had to run nginx in front of it for https.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#148
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? che…

Thanks. As the industry [0] continues to put its weight behind NFV [1] and SDNs [2] along with the rise of IDNs [3], do you see network-appliances keeping up the share of the market against those solutions? I believe @Edge network might continue to require these appliances for WAF, Firewall/DPI (and other things I don't know about)... but that'd be a niche? [0] http://opennetworking.org/ [1] https://www.opnfv.org/ [2…

Not gonna lie, that question is almost not something i'm qualified to answer, since I was more focused on specific ssl technologies/integrations, but I'll have a go.

Obviously they won't go away, but network appliances definitely won't keep their share because not everyone needs them as SDNs get better. I see the SDN and IDN as mostly solving multivendor integration issues and making it easier to configure at least semi-complicated networks, which doesn't make them a drop-in replacement for many of the problems f5 is trying to solve. For certain network loads they might achieve performance parity, too.

One of the draws for an f5 box for a large customer is that instead of having like 5 vendors or OSS technologies that they have to maintain for load balancing, ssl-termination, hardware-accelerated/-hardened encryption/decryption, SAML, firewalls, etc. you have one company's product (that hopefully has been designed to work well with itself) to do all of that that's configured from one location. If you don't have to worry about that multivendor orchestration headache, then massive network appliances like BIGIP aren't a value add over having a couple vendors.

Another draw for BIGIP is doing things at the speed of packet flow or nearly so even for VM containers and even for fully encrypted SSL. If you don't have to care about making sure to squeeze every last microsecond of latency or bandwidth out of you 10Gbs or 100Gbs fiber connection, BIGIP isn't a value add over SDN. If you only care a little bit, than an SDN could be way cheaper than BIGIP because you can configure things to do what you need for lower hardware and support costs.

For the people who care about that multivendor issue and performance, they're always going to have hardware dedicated to networking, even if they use SDNs or IDNs, because they need that dedicated compute to achieve their goals. Sustained 10Gbs connections are no joke, let alone 40Gbs or 100Gbs. Same with tens of thousands of simultaneous SSL connections. All of a sudden you need dedicated ASICS/"Raw Compute" and RAM to keep up with the firehose of packets. Plus, network appliances will begin to integrate with SDNs and IDNs, so for customers on the border between needing an appliance and a getting by with an IDN or SDN and more manpower, the form of the network appliance will change, but they're still going to have hardware down in their server room or compute instances in their cloud dedicated to networking infra. If you want SSL-termination? You need compute. Hardware accelerated or hardened SSL termination? You need specialized hardware. Firewalls? Compute. SAML? Compute. Complicated NATs? Compute. If you've got a couple BIGIPs in your server room, your network's complicated enough and/or bandwidth heavy and/or low latency enough that you're going to have nearly as much racks dedicated for your SDN so that it has enough compute as you do for network appliances.

BIGIP isn't valuable because it's great a router or switch. It's great because of how much it does on top of that in a single server/VM, and how well it does it. And most of what it's great at are not things that an SDN will solve. Sure, the configuration tweaking will have parity and maybe load balancing performance (but having seen how BIGIP achieves it, especially for complicated setups, i kinda doubt it). But if BIGIP integrates with SDNs or with IDNs even just a little, then what could happen is that people on the borderline are just going to get slightly smaller BIGIPs and offload some of the tasks where BIGIP overlaps with SDNs/IDNs and the BIGIP will just be another node in the SDN. If BIGIP goes in on SDN and IDN, then you might even see people buying larger BIGIPs to orchestrate their overall SDN and IDN.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#149
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is interesting is that we are seeing people in other industries shamed for hiring people in unpaid or underpaid jobs and even people shamed for taking those jobs. I wonder if that is something that will ever happen in the software industry. Open source software is clearly a net positive overall. However is it a net negative for the industry when enterprise developers rely on open source software without demandin…

I think a lot of it truly is passion. Interns have goals that typically don't align with the company they go to work for. That's why they take crap pay. They get to not care and in return the company doesn't have to care about them! Everybody wins, and it's a choice all around. So it's mutually agreeable that the intern will put in some effort and get some reward. Speaking for my own open source projects; There are a…

How is having a passion for a particular piece of software different than having a passion for a specific job or company? Plenty of people have enough passion for an internship that they are willing to take it for free. However society has been discouraging that over recent years because that route is only available to people who have outside financial support and it can easily be abused by employers. Open source software has the same potential drawbacks.

Not every piece of open source software is diminishing the value of enterprise software developers just like not every unpaid internship is reducing the value of entry level labor, however both systems can easily (and even unintentionally) be abused by businesses.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#150
post #72
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…

The same nginx I was using yesterday, I have a license for tomorrow.

You already have a license for it today, too.
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