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Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

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Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#341

Post by gbuk2013 »

zinkem wrote: post #283
gbuk2013 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I learn something new today - thanks.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#342

Post by ec109685 »

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…

The company sold for 650 million so it isn’t a bad outcome. They took open source code made better by tons of volunteers, added their proprietary bits and were successful and sold the company.

Isn’t this a great win?

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#343

Post by pcnix »

panarky wrote: post #177
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amazon figured this out and surrounded their high-margin computing resources with a dizzying array of free-as-in-beer tools. But they also figured out that making their free-as-in-beer tools also free-as-in-freedom open source, they'd lift all clouds and not just their own. As the dominant player, Amazon loses from anything that reduces vendor lock-in. That's why precious little of Amazon's cloud tooling is released…

Interesting read on this topic by Stratechery - https://stratechery.com/2016/how-google-cloud-platform-is-ch...

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#344

Post by snaky »

ec109685 wrote: post #342
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…

The company sold for 650 million so it isn’t a bad outcome. They took open source code made better by tons of volunteers, added their proprietary bits and were successful and sold the company. Isn’t this a great win?

> They took open source code made better by tons of volunteers

Had all the volunteers' impact being so big? Nginx was created by single developer who is NGINX, Inc CTO now, and then developed pretty much by Nginx employees only.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#345

Post by KaiserPro »

laura2013 wrote: post #210
KaiserPro wrote: post #88

Well it makes sense for F5. Their main buisness, hardware loadbalancing is rapidly diminishing, so buying in NGINX seems like a sensible move. After all, its much easier to sell support to people who are actually _using_ your product.

hey, can you provide a source for their decrease in market share? Or are you assuming based on AWS growth? I tried looking up the Gartner starts but couldn't get past a login.

Sorry based on my own ignorance.

In 2014 we had two, then I moved company to where we had 6 loadbalancers, in the four years we were there we killed them off with a mix of AWS and k8s

At most recent place, I'd no even consider installing them.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#346

Post by nwellnhof »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #223
sneak wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has the AGPL ever successfully held up in court?

Yes, Artifex sued Hancom over their use of Ghostscript [1]. (The article says GPL, but Ghostscript has an AGPL license.) The judge denied a motion to dismiss the claims, and they reached a settlement for an undisclosed amount. I don't think many developers are aware that Ghostscript has an AGPL license, and I've heard that the commercial license costs $25k per year. It's very easy to just `apt-get install ghostscript…

> but this violates the AGPL license when you are running a SaaS application

Only if you modify the Ghostscript source code.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#347

Post by mfjordvald »

snaky wrote: post #344
ec109685 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company sold for 650 million so it isn’t a bad outcome. They took open source code made better by tons of volunteers, added their proprietary bits and were successful and sold the company. Isn’t this a great win?

> They took open source code made better by tons of volunteers Had all the volunteers' impact being so big? Nginx was created by single developer who is NGINX, Inc CTO now, and then developed pretty much by Nginx employees only.

Very big yes! No doubt Igor deserves the majority of the honour for Nginx, but volunteer contributors were a big part earlier on, both in patches, investigations and community support.

Search through the change log for "thanks to" http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES and you'll see a lot of contributions. Two people who stand out as frequent contributors are Piotr Sikora and Maxim Dounin (who went on to actually work at Nginx!).

And this does not show the mailing list discussions and bug investigations or the documentation maintained by the community in the early days.

[This post is not intended to mean this sale is bad, just to highlight some of the awesome community contributors]

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#348

Post by koffiezet »

breakingcups wrote: post #324
bb88 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implementation matters to google, more than to say the average company that uses Hadoop. At "Google-scale" small imperfections become huge imperfections. What's good for the bottom 90% of tech companies probably isn't for the top 10%.

I'd argue Kubernetes isn't the best choice for the bottom 90%. There's a lot of companies you could describe as tech and many are doing just fine in the old world of manual application provisioning.

I don't agree at all. While the large majority does not need the scalability it offers, it can benefit from all the other stuff applying the 'best practices' offers. The problem is - that many people do not stick to the best practices and do not know how to build containerised applications.

Implementing the whole "DevOps" idea just becomes a whole lot easier when developers don't even have the concept of their snowflake server anymore. And yes - k8s has a ton of overhead and is pretty complex to get into at first, but it all makes sense. There are many points that could be criticised about it, it's far from perfect, but having a standardised way of deploying whatever application has been a massive game changer in the development environments I've been thrown in.

Source/disclaimer: I'm a consultant that has seen quite a few k8s/openshift fuckups and success stories, both on large and small scale.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#350

Post by snaky »

StreamBright wrote: post #336
bb88 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implementation matters to google, more than to say the average company that uses Hadoop. At "Google-scale" small imperfections become huge imperfections. What's good for the bottom 90% of tech companies probably isn't for the top 10%.

I am a consultant working on Hadoop installations across the globe. As an average I usually able to save 70% disk usage and 30% overall cost by changing the defaults to a reasonable value as well as migrating companies out of HDFS to something like S3. I have spent majority of my career (10 years) working on Hadoop and I can tell you that it is a terrible piece of software with insane ineffciency all over the place.…

> This find | xargs mawk | mawk pipeline gets us down to a runtime of about 12 seconds, or about 270MB/sec, which is around 235 times faster than the Hadoop implementation.

https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...

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