NGINX 2019 F5 announcements for DevOps, NetOps, and SecOps

At NGINX Conf, F5 Networks announced several new solutions designed to help DevOps, NetOps, and SecOps teams better collaborate in delivering modern applications.

“Companies are at a digital tipping point,” said Gus Robertson, SVP and GM of NGINX at F5. “They must modernize their apps and infrastructure in order to offer experiences as compelling as today’s most popular consumer apps—but often with far fewer means. We believe NGINX, with the resources of F5, can accelerate customers’ modernization efforts, and we’re excited to debut NGINX solutions at our annual user event, NGINX Conf.”

An estimated 75% of organizations will be completely digitally transformed in the next decade, according to a recent IDC survey (sourced from IDC API Management Survey 2019, conducted on behalf of NGINX). Contemporary pressure to transform is causing businesses to examine new application architectures. In the same survey, IDC found that, by 2022, 90% of all new apps will feature a microservices architecture and 35% of all production apps will be cloud-native. Although these architectures are critical to supporting digital business efforts, they yield a corresponding explosion in complexity due to tool sprawl. As a result, enterprises experience a growing divide between DevOps and traditional infrastructure roles like NetOps and SecOps. To combine the efforts of these groups, enterprises need an application platform that scales, responds, and self-heals to deliver a reliable customer experience in the digital era. The NGINX Application Platform—a suite of application delivery, application server, and API management technologies—helps customers bridge the divide, accelerate DevOps investments, and expand the use of cloud, containers, and microservices.

Now part of F5, NGINX resources have been infused with more than 150 additional product development employees—the combination of F5 resources and new hires—to accelerate development efforts. In addition to the continued enhancement of existing NGINX open source and commercial products, the team is pursuing new solutions based on the company’s market-leading security innovations. Early returns from this increased investment will be on display this week at NGINX Conf.

“This year’s theme is ‘level up,’ because customers tell us they need to invest in new tools and skills to compete in an increasingly digital world,” Robertson added. “We’ll demonstrate how to level up tools with new app delivery, app server, and API management solutions, and then we’ll cap it off with a bold vision for fundamentally changing how teams deliver apps—from code to customer.”

Specifically, it highlights the ways F5 and NGINX help organizations level up their app delivery and API tools with:

New innovations in NGINX open source projects. F5 is committed to accelerating the development of NGINX open source technologies. Open source is a critical component of modern application and DevOps toolchains. At Conf, NGINX is showcasing:

• Upcoming HTTP/3 capabilities in NGINX Open Source
• Enhanced proxying and network capabilities in the NGINX Unit application server

New product versions in the NGINX Application Platform. NGINX is announcing four new versions of products that build atop NGINX Open Source, all designed to further consolidate as many as 13 discrete tools into a single, programmable software platform that includes:

• Improved security and observability capabilities in NGINX Plus
• New developer portal and API importing in the NGINX Controller API Management Module
• Better analytics and configuration management in the NGINX Controller Load Balancing Module
• Added custom resource definitions (CRDs) in NGINX Kubernetes Ingress Controller

New ecosystem innovations from Arm and NS1. Arm, together with NGINX, will showcase how companies can achieve significant cost and power efficiencies with Arm Neoverse -based solutions for a wide range of applications, running on Amazon EC2 A1 instances in the AWS Cloud. NGINX is also demonstrating continued support for customer choice and flexibility with a new Certified Module that seamlessly integrates NS1 global server load balancing with NGINX Plus.

Organizations also must rethink how their teams leverage those tools to deliver modern apps and APIs. NGINX Conf will provide a sneak peek at forthcoming technologies that will drive meaningful collaboration between DevOps, NetOps, and SecOps teams throughout the application lifecycle. Company leaders will illustrate how customers can empower cross-functional teams with:

Analytics and management capabilities based on application-centric (not infrastructure-centric) design, providing valuable insights around the lifeblood of today’s organizations: apps.

Self-service capabilities that integrate with CI/CD toolchains and drive increased agility and business responsiveness.

Accelerated module development, with the availability of a service mesh and advanced security modules that push intelligence and behavioral analysis even closer to the app.