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Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

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Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#371

Post by jimjag »

ummonk wrote: post #205
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…

Given how widely used nginx is, wouldn’t a community maintained fork be the most likely outcome of things changing for the worse?

The problem, of course, when all contributions are "limited" to those within the company, that the talent and expertise required to keep things going exist just in the company itself, and not in the overall open source community. So when the company behind the tech "goes away", all the knowledge does too. It's for that reason that open source that is totally under the control of one company is so dangerous. Sure, you have the ability to fork, but the reality is that such a fork is almost assuredly doomed to fail. You really are beholden to that company.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#372

Post by jimjag »

skoskie wrote: post #284
brightball wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nowhere near as fast with concurrent connections.

That is simply untrue. Apache 2.4.x w/ the Event MPM is just as fast and actually has lower latency. That FUD has long, long since been disproved.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#373

Post by jimjag »

user5994461 wrote: post #91
s_kilk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwing out a question to the room: if the worst happens and Nginx gets butchered, would it be so bad to go back to using Apache? I've never used it really, everything I've done has been Nginx, but is there some technical reason why Apache wouldn't be a fine fallback option for an open-source server?

HaProxy does load balancing better, it never was a primary feature of nginx. Varnish can do the caching. Apache/Lighttpd can serve files and CGI, but maybe not as efficiently. Apache is really struggling on resource consumption. It's still living in the world of one process or one thread per connection. Operationally it always ends up in a clusterfuck of rewrite rules and there are many gotchas with undocumented and…

"It's still living in the world of one process or one thread per connection."

It hasn't lived in that world for a decade or so. It's great to give advice, but at least make it valid and factual. With the Apache 2.4 event MPM, httpd is async and event-driven and is just as fast as nginx.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#374

Post by kayoone »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #354
quickthrower2 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that lose is pronounced looze and loose is pronounced looce I can see why it’s confusing.

I learned how to spell it in early grade school--maybe eight years old--so I don't understand what's confusing about it but I'm an educated man.

then maybe you should learn that a lot of HN readers are not native English speakers.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#375

Post by jimjag »

rocky1138 wrote: post #220

Are we all going to move back to Apache httpd?

Why not? Apache 2.4 with the Event MPM is async and event-driven, just as fast as nginx, lower latency, more fully compliant w/ RFC specs, robust reverse proxy w/ load balancing and dynamic configuration, super-fast caching,... and fully and completely open source.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#376

Post by [deleted] »

TkTech wrote: post #302
notyourwork wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess this[1] image from the F5 article gives an idea of where nginx fits from their perspective. F5 is a huge company (4000~ employees) that already likely has thousands of boxes running nginx. If you're going to continue using nginx as a critical piece of your business you might as well secure its future. [1]: https://www.f5.com/content/dam/f5-com/page-assets-en/home-en...

[deleted]

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#377

Post by alexhutcheson »

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.…

Is there a good open source alternative that meets the HDFS use-case (i.e. file or blob storage, rather than a KV store designed for point lookups)? Or is tuning the HDFS defaults the best you can do without migrating onto someone's cloud platform?

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#378

Post by wbl »

dikei wrote: post #231
shereadsthenews wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But K8s is not a development of Google software. It is developed specifically for the public, it throws out all of the interesting parts of Borg, and Google themselves don't use it, or barely do. As for that other stuff it seems to have worked out fine for Google: they describe obsolete technologies and the outside world develops hideous analogs of those and uses them for decades. Hadoop for example is just an unbeli…

Well, nobody should be using MapReduce now, and HDFS now is a lot better than 8 years ago. Without Google using, validating and releasing those design, we might be stuck with MPI and NFS for a lot longer.

How many GMM can MapReduce do? What about lattice quantum chronodynamics performance? MPI and Lustre exist for a reason: map reduce isn't great for all problems.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#379

Post by tingol »

nvarsj wrote: post #364
tingol wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because your core business feature is done by someone else and you just take it and use it for your own profit without giving anything back. Do you need a definition of what scummy means?

No need to be rude. I know what scummy means. It's just not clear to me why this is considered scummy. Anyone is welcome to take the open source and benefit from it as long as they comply with the license. This is a very fundamental aspect of open source. A company invests money and engineers in building commercial tooling, which you then pay for because there is added value. You are not paying for the open source -…

I apologize for the brash response.

The "comply with the license" part is the problem you're not seeing, using open source as SaaS is a loophole not a license feature.

An example being, I license something as open source which means if you don't pay for it (assuming there's an option for that), you are bound to follow the license I provided which means all further work has to be open source (the same license I used) and source has to be provided with the product. In an ideal world this would mean either:

1. We both get paid

2. We both contribute to open software which is available to anyone

But in our world it means, technically I'm not selling software but a service so I don't have to do shit. so the result (with scummy companies) is the following:

1. I don't get paid for software critical to your business

2. No one gets the benefit of the new product created despite my license

Hence, scum.

Re: Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

#380

Post by jimjag »

tyingq wrote: post #167

I wonder if load balancer and API gateway products might eventually converge. Things like Kong, Tyk and Apigee have caching, embedded scripting, basic load balancing, etc. They aren't as good as Nginx or Haproxy at it, but a single product outside the app would be attractive.

"Things like Kong, Tyk and Apigee have caching, embedded scripting, basic load balancing, etc. "

Hmmm... like Apache httpd?

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