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We Should Ditch Nginx

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Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#81

Post by GhotiFish »

danenania wrote: post #65

Why is this getting upvoted? We should ditch Nginx because they are trying to build a sustainable business on top of their amazing OSS contribution? When quality OSS projects like Nginx turn into profitable businesses, that's very good for OSS as a whole. We should be cheering them and gasp paying them if we need their high end features, not abandoning them.

sensible right up until they start rejecting patches for needed features because they conflict with commercial goals.

There's a legitimate conflict of interest here.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#82

Post by grey-area »

ars_technician wrote: post #6
yeukhon wrote: post #2

> Who will pick up the mantle and actively develop the next game-changing FOSS web server? We are writing and waiting. I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to suggest people to ditch nginx, take the initiative and fork it and start doing the support. It's one of those "rants" we hear and nobody does anything. > Getting these NGINX log events into a remote server is easy with rsyslog. But preventing the log even…

>I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to suggest people to ditch nginx, take the initiative and fork it and start doing the support. Perhaps he doesn't have the hours/skills free to do so. People are free to complain about things or do a 'call-to-arms' about things they can't fix themselves. >And what is the problem with writing to disk? Performance >I guess RAM disk is fine? It works, but it's a hack and major…

Perhaps he doesn't have the hours/skills free to do so. People are free to complain about things or do a 'call-to-arms' about things they can't fix themselves.

I think in the case of open source we have far too many people who feel entitled to the work of others without any recompense already. Working on a large OS project like this is mostly a thankless task - people will complain about the problems while taking for granted all the features that just work, and they're unlikely to be raking in lots of money because of attitudes like this.

Given the volume of sales, the 3 floor building and the use of NetApp, I would have thought this company has money to pay nginx for what is a core piece of software, even if they have to negotiate a special license or change their setup. If they don't want to or can't, they can use apache, find workarounds, or even patch nginx themselves.

Issuing a call to arms over this is pretty obnoxious behaviour, because it implies the nginx people have done something wrong or antisocial in wanting to be paid for some of their work. How outrageous!

the point is that a basic feature is being held hostage behind a pay-wall. It would be like MySQL requiring you to pay to any users other than the 'admin' SQL account.

Yes, it would be like that (though this feature is more trivial and could be worked around, and is not an existing feature, so not exactly the same). That's the way companies make money when they segment their market and have an OS offering and a commercial one. Nothing wrong with that. If you don't like the rules set by the creators, don't use it; write your own software or use other software. If they had retrospectively retired features and put them into the paid version, perhaps he'd have a point, but as far as I'm aware they haven't.

He's not entitled to have the nginx guys work for free forever on his terms on their software. Ending with the exhortation 'Fork it' sums up his position perfectly - someone else should fork this software, add the features I need, and then continue to work for free for me. He's asking 'Who will pick up the mantle', because clearly it won't be him; he's not a sucker after all.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#83

Post by crdoconnor »

egwor wrote: post #61
chrissnell wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies everyone for the somewhat o/t question here but, what do you guys do with your 50Gb of logs every second? Where do they go after they leave nginx?

definitely interested in this. Where do you send this for analysis? Elastic search? Can that keep up?

NSA :)

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#84

Post by timdumol »

venus wrote: post #64
jacques_chester wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not disagreeing that in this specific case that the licence structure might lead to unhappy arithmetic. I do however stand by my original point that syslog support is an excellent cleavage point to segment the customer base.

Yeah, I do agree with that. I'm slightly less happy about the HTTP live streaming being in the Plus package, though. I've been playing around a lot with a media app using HLS and I can't even trial using nginx for it - not that I'd be too happy paying $1300 a year since I don't have a single user yet. I can see how they are trying to get money out of the big streaming companies, but it's not too friendly to the littl…

FYI, you might want to try nginx-rtmp-module (https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module); HLS support is one of its advertised features. I've been using it for RTMP and it's been working flawlessly.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#85

Post by jesalas »

Hi everyone, I certainly didn't expect this strong of a response! I wrote the blog post as more of a slice-of-tech-life brain dump or request for comments/ideas. I certainly won't suggest that everyone should ditch NGINX, but it has possibly run its course for us. As I mentioned, I think that NGINX is an amazing piece of software. It's actually powering the very site where I complained about it. I just can't justify recommending licenses for it at work when we don't do anything with it that Apache httpd couldn't do for free.

You guys are right, The Site is poorly designed and suffers from a lot of architectural flaws. That's why I have a job in the first place! It's been a long journey getting to where we are and there's a lot more to do.

Thanks to everyone for the opinions and ideas!

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#86

Post by fsniper »

GhotiFish wrote: post #81
danenania wrote: post #65

Why is this getting upvoted? We should ditch Nginx because they are trying to build a sustainable business on top of their amazing OSS contribution? When quality OSS projects like Nginx turn into profitable businesses, that's very good for OSS as a whole. We should be cheering them and gasp paying them if we need their high end features, not abandoning them.

sensible right up until they start rejecting patches for needed features because they conflict with commercial goals. There's a legitimate conflict of interest here.

No you can always fork. That's a business they have the right to accept or reject patches however they like.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#87

Post by grey-area »

sbierwagen wrote: post #80
chrissnell wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies everyone for the somewhat o/t question here but, what do you guys do with your 50Gb of logs every second? Where do they go after they leave nginx?

To the NSA, presumably: http://exiledonline.com/read-yasha-levines-introduction-to-t...

Not a customer of Cloudflare, but that seems a bit unlikely given the CEO has called NSA gag orders 'insane':

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/12...

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#88

Post by crdoconnor »

ars_technician wrote: post #6
yeukhon wrote: post #2

> Who will pick up the mantle and actively develop the next game-changing FOSS web server? We are writing and waiting. I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to suggest people to ditch nginx, take the initiative and fork it and start doing the support. It's one of those "rants" we hear and nobody does anything. > Getting these NGINX log events into a remote server is easy with rsyslog. But preventing the log even…

>I don't mean to be harsh - but if you were to suggest people to ditch nginx, take the initiative and fork it and start doing the support. Perhaps he doesn't have the hours/skills free to do so. People are free to complain about things or do a 'call-to-arms' about things they can't fix themselves. >And what is the problem with writing to disk? Performance >I guess RAM disk is fine? It works, but it's a hack and major…

>>I guess RAM disk is fine? >It works, but it's a hack and major technical debt to hold.

Why? It seems like a pretty reasonable solution to me.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#89

Post by mrmincent »

So these guys have one of the biggest days of their year coming up, seem to be running a large operation, and are only just realising this now. You get what you pay for, and from the sounds of it they haven't paid much.

Re: We Should Ditch Nginx

#90

Post by jesalas »

icambron wrote: post #34
jacques_chester wrote: post #23

This blog post demonstrates why the syslog feature is ideal for segmenting Nginx's market. Almost nobody cares about it, except the sort of place doing > tens of millions of requests per day. The sort of place that might have some money and the scale to realise that a few thousand bucks is cheaper than a bunch of engineer time. It's a good case study in smart pricing.

This. From the article: >I don’t blame NGINX for wanting money in exchange for what is admittedly amazing software. I just don’t want any part of it. Why not? You're using this awesome software whose value you appreciate and which is, you admit, open source. It's just not convenient enough for you. So why can't you pony up the money for your huge, high-traffic website?

It's pretty simple actually: We don't have an HTTP server software budget. The expectation is that the tech team will choose the right tools for the job and ask for paid tools when we need them (eg. New Relic). NGINX doesn't differentiate enough from the other HTTP servers out there to justify the cost.
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