Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks • Hacker News Board

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#181

Post by tedivm » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:37 PM UTC

VectorLock wrote: post #178

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…

"How much is it?" "How much you got?"

Pretty much this. Not Hashicorp, but another vendor I was speaking to initial gave me a $10,000 a month quote that we got knocked down to $500 a month after some negotiating.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#182

Post by geofft » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:37 PM UTC

feydaykyn wrote: post #151

zmix wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

For context, Elasticsearch merged their proprietary add-ons into the main repos https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open and MongoDB relicensed to a not-quite-open-source license that compels you to release code for your entire infrastructure if you're running MongoDB as a servie https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license... . If you make your money on support and not open core, it's difficult for Amazon to do anything to you, e.g., Red Hat is doing just fine despite Amazon Linux being a thing.

(There's also https://aws.amazon.com/corretto/ , a long-term-support version of the JDK, because Oracle is getting more aggressive about Oracle JDK licensing.)

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#183

Post by etaioinshrdlu » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

OJFord wrote: post #67

buryat wrote: post #27

what are some good alternatives to nginx?

Caddy

I found Caddy to have a lot of user-hostile behavior, and outright dangerous behavior in the way it fetches SSL certificates.

It is a very bad choice for critical sites that can't go down.

AWS's application load balancer with SSL is much more reliable.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#184

Post by mlindner » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

StudentStuff wrote: post #28

shereadsthenews wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash, apparently. I like how Wilson Sonsini advised F5 in the purchase while firm heir Peter Sonsini invested in Nginx corp. Good times for old money in the Valley.

I thought F5 was primarily a Seattle based company? I've known more F5 employees growing up in Seattle than Amazon employees at least. On another note, F5's poorly written code is the reason TLS 1.0 is considered insecure (using a variant of the POODLE attack), among other major security lapses.

F5 has a few hundred person office in San Jose as well as a decent amount in Tel Aviv as well.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#185

Post by ddragosd » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

buryat wrote: post #27

what are some good alternatives to nginx?

I'd rather narrow the problem to "what you really need to achieve".

See this benchmark for some inspiration: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r17&hw=...

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#186

Post by tommu » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:41 PM UTC

gbuk2013 wrote: post #44

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"..a nice WebUI"

I challenge that assertion!

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#187

Post by petemc_ » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:42 PM UTC

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.

Citrix Netscaler does use Freebsd, not sure which version off the top off my head.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#188

Post by DangitBobby » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:44 PM UTC

mholt wrote: post #150

sneak wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You already have a license for it today, too.

Are you the person behind caddy or is your username just a coincidence?

Edit: sorry, I should have just checked your profile.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#189

Post by sxah » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:45 PM UTC

elagost wrote: post #83

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.

I use F5's at work. The F5's do their job very very well, but are very very touchy. I've always considered nginx to be solid, stable, and low-maintenance. I think the opposite about F5 and am worried about this transition. 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 m…

> 1) You can't export and re-import a config. Just doesn't work.

Besides normal archives (that are just tgz files) or manual config changes and re-loading, try "(tmsh) load sys config merge from-terminal (or file)". It is going to be a gamechanger. ;-) Takes any config snippet from "(tmsh) list..." or the bigip.conf files without rewriting into create/modify statements and add/replace-all-with blocks. No problem to import even large configs like 100KB at once, all as an atomic transaction.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#190

Post by dsl » Mon, Mar 11, 2019, 11:47 PM UTC

darksoul wrote: post #73

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…

According to the public statements, F5 is committing to maintain the current level of resources NGINX has allocated to their open source programs, to keep the same dev team involved, to keep licensing as it currently is, not change any of the repositories on Mercurial and GitHub and to keep the NGINX brand. Which only means that NGINX will get even better over time.

NGINX was already paywalling bug fixes once they launched Pro.

proxy_pass for example will only resolve a hostname at the time the configuration is parsed, unless you use a convoluted variable hack. This was a serious issue requiring you to restart your fleet if a backend server changed IPs. The bug fix for this was implemented only in Pro and sold as "DNS for Service Discovery."