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Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

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Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#151

Post by feydaykyn »

zmix wrote: post #133
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…

> your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. As somebody, who has no knowledge about that part of the business (Amazon Web Services in production), could you elaborate on that with a few lines or point me to some articles? Thank you.

Just today, AWS announced a fork of Elasticsearch: Open Distro for Elasticsearch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602

A few months ago, AWS launched a MongoDb fork

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#152

Post by nodesocket »

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.

Do you have inside knowledge of this? I wouldn't be surprised; open-source enterprise software is incredibly hard, but Terraform Enterprise for example is a really solid offering and not to expensive. It is actually very doable even for small (< 5 people) startups.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#153

Post by reza_n »

speeq wrote: post #147
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…

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

https://hitch-tls.org/

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#154

Post by argd678 »

imroot wrote: post #114
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

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…

It’s likely because they give different pricing based on who’s asking, which is normal for products that aren’t commodities.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#155

Post by jlockhardt »

They probably bought nginx because AVI networks has been winning F5s largest customers away one major logo at a time, and are scrambling to compete. F5 already bought a software load balancer in the past and did nothing with it, so they will once again probably do nothing with NGINX and struggle to build something as usual. I replaced f5 with AVI and know of a number of global companies that have done it as well. Interesting times for the ADC space. Bye bye nginx. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi...

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#156

Post by mattdeboard »

core-questions wrote: post #141
imroot wrote: 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...

> since so many companies still do this, the math must work out

survivorship bias

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#157

Post by joshAg »

Diederich wrote: post #106
gonzo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Recent F5 systems are running CentOS 6.

Centos 7 starting around version 14.

Way way back they used to be on BSD. Then they moved to centos for cough cough cough (possibly NDAed) cough cough.

It's not a huge deal which because the host OS isn't anywhere in the dataplane.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#158

Post by mattjaynes »

I've recently been getting quite a few marketing emails from nginx pushing for replacing F5 with nginx. Just checked and the last one I received was last thursday, March 7th.

Interesting how recently nginx was continuing this campaign. I wonder how effective the "replace F5 with NGINX" marketing push was at increasing the price and urgency for the acquisition.

For the curious, the big headline at the top of the message was "Modernizing Applications by Replacing F5 with NGINX Application Delivery Controller and Signal Sciences"

Then the text of that top section was:

"F5’s rigid and centralized approach to load balancing and web application firewall (WAF) prevents enterprises from modernizing their applications. In this recent webinar we describe how replacing or augmenting your F5 deployment with the NGINX application delivery controller and Signal Sciences WAF helps reduce costs and improve agility."

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#159

Post by zokier »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #87

I'm guessing this will upset many devs longing for nginx per default. Personally, I never understood why nginx is so popular with a particular demographic, and have always preferred tried-and-true Apache httpd.

nginx had very well performing event driven core from the get-go. Apache event mpm module stabilized only in 2.4, and at that point nginx was already quite popular.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#160

Post by tyingq »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #126
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…

This is incredibly deft on F5's part. What are the alternatives to F5's products? Cloud products, and home rolled Nginx configs.

I imagine haproxy might get more popular if F5 does anything to hobble the open source part of nginx.
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