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Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

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Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#281

Post by arbie »

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...

> Atlassian [...] doesn't negotiate at all.

Untrue if you license multiple products from them at scale.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#282

Post by notyourwork »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #134
darksoul wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every company that has ever acquired anything says this exact same thing. Then the deal closes and it’s back to bottom line numbers.

In this case how does f5 make or lose money from Nginx?

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#283

Post by zinkem »

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.

> any stage of the request or the response L4-L7 at FPGA speeds

I also work at F5, and used to work on the FPGA. This is unfortunately not true for TCL iRules. The FPGA basically only operates on L2-4, L7 is all software.

There was some talk about doing L7/iRules in an FPGA but prototypes never produced compelling enough performance gains to make it worth it.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#284

Post by skoskie »

brightball wrote: post #271
dsl wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

How’s Apache doing these days? Haven’t looked in a while

Nowhere near as fast with concurrent connections.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#285

Post by fulafel »

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…

The replacement should be written in a memory-safe language. Including the TLS library.

"There is more to life than increasing its speed."

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#286

Post by person_of_color »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #18
miguelmota wrote: post #13

Acquired for $670 million https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-acquires-n...

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.

How does a random person become part of this scene?

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#287

Post by archgoon »

late2part wrote: post #275
shereadsthenews wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately we can't discuss the parts of Google's platform that aren't in Kubernetes on this forum. If we could, I think I could defend my statement reasonably well. But perhaps you just don't think that the pieces I would mention qualify as interesting.

oooh tell us more! or have a private conversation on your multicolored bike on the way to the cafe serving tri tip today!

Partial information is better than none.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#289

Post by throw2016 »

This is vaguely discomforting but perhaps inevitable in a world where open source is sponsored, funded or developed by corporate interests.

The connection with end users and ideology has been broken as everything from the kernel to major projects are corporate funded and driven.

And most inadvertently acknowledge this when they raise concerns about the sustainability of projects without financial or corporate backing. The exploding complexity of things like browsers and projects like Systemd make the idea of individuals and smalls team developing alternatives without corporate backing a non stater.

Most open source projects in the last 10 years would see this kind of acquisition as an ideal outcome and for vc funded ones a necessary one. Even a 'fork' of Nginx at this time would most likely be driven by commercial motives so the 'vague discomfort' expressed in this comment itself is perhaps misplaced.

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