Simplifying Modern Application Delivery: Nine Months of F5 NGINX One
Just over nine months ago, we introduced F5 NGINX One, a unified package built to simplify the complexities of delivering modern applications. By bringing together trusted technologies like F5 NGINX Plus, F5 NGINX Ingress Controller, and a centralized management plane like the F5 NGINX One Console, we set out to offer teams a streamlined solution for scaling their infrastructure, operating with control, and building secure, reliable systems.
Since then, our teams have been hard at work delivering new features and functionalities across the components of NGINX One. Each enhancement has been geared toward solving real-world operational challenges, from accelerating time to market to improving visibility over distributed environments and securing workloads. These updates reflect our commitment to help modern organizations navigate the demands of high-performance application delivery.
Here’s how NGINX One has enabled teams to move faster, reduce operational complexity, and build trust in their application ecosystems.
Accelerating time to value and flexibility
Delivering faster results is as much about speed as it is about empowering teams to deploy quickly, optimize their environments, and adapt to shifting requirements. Here are key capabilities we have introduced that equip platform teams to achieve these outcomes.
- Faster workflows with the F5 AI Assistant. The F5 AI Assistant speeds up issue resolution, repetitive task handling, and configuration management by providing practical insights and context-specific recommendations based on NGINX documentation and best practices.
Figure 1: F5 AI Assistant delivers intelligent capabilities to simplify management and security of apps and APIs using a natural language interface.
- Speeding up app performance with HTTP Early Hints. Introduced in NGINX Plus R35, HTTP Early Hints enables resource preloading even before the user’s browser requests them. By streamlining website load times, this feature improves the user experience for high-performance web applications.
- Improved API access control. With tiered rate-limiting in NGINX Ingress Controller 5.0, organizations can control API access dynamically based on user membership tiers. This ensures consistent performance at scale and more reliable service delivery for diverse user groups.
- Optimized lightweight deployment. The NGINX Instance Manager 2.20 lightweight deployment mode eliminates ClickHouse overhead, optimizing resource usage while prioritizing essential features for faster deployments.
Together, these innovations provide the tools organizations need to stay agile and meet ever-evolving requirements.
Simplifying distributed control and governance
Distributed application architectures pose increasing challenges for teams attempting to uphold consistency, governance, and visibility. Through NGINX One, we’ve delivered a unified way to manage infrastructure across Kubernetes, virtual machines, and hybrid environments.
The NGINX One Console expands centralized management for Kubernetes deployments and all NGINX instances, allowing teams to efficiently monitor performance, system health, and vulnerabilities across environments. NGINX One also breaks down silos across distributed teams. New features like staged configurations and config import/export simplify setups, enable collaboration among distributed teams, and reduce friction in iterative deployment workflows.
In addition, NGINX One also reinforces governance through role-based access control (RBAC). Enhanced RBAC capabilities enable administrators to assign granular permissions, create custom roles aligned with organizational policies, and ensure better separation of duties for adherence to governance frameworks.
By addressing the growing complexity of modern app environments, we’ve ensured ops teams achieve unified management and governance at scale. This enables enterprises to spend less time coordinating tools and more time delivering value.
Fortifying application security
Managing advanced threats, compliance demands, and rapid development cycles calls for security solutions that are smart, automated, and simple. Our recent enhancements to NGINX One embed security into workflows without increasing operational overhead.
For instance, the NGINX One Console centralizes F5 NGINX App Protect WAF policy management, helping teams simplify deployment, minimize misconfiguration risks, and improve collaboration between security and development across distributed environments.
Figure 2: NGINX One Console centralizes and simplifies NGINX App Protect WAF policy management.
We also enhanced authentication workflows with native OpenID Connect (OIDC) support. This feature in NGINX Plus R34 simplifies secure authentication and authorization with features like Relying Party-Initiated Logout, user profile retrieval, and built-in identity federation workflows, reducing resource overhead and the need for custom scripts.
F5 also improved proactive threat detection and mitigation. The NGINX One Console enhances threat detection with real-time CVE monitoring and alerting, while IP intelligence in NGINX App Protect strengthens defenses by blocking malicious traffic using an updated threat database.
By embedding these new security features directly into app delivery workflows, NGINX One ensures protection without compromising speed or agility.
Looking ahead
In addition to a series of new releases, NGINX One is part of the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform. Each component of this platform plays a crucial role in enabling organizations to accelerate, control, and secure modern apps, APIs, and AI workloads. Designed as a unified solution, the platform ensures reliable performance, robust security, and seamless scalability for applications deployed across cloud, hybrid, and edge environments.
As you can see, the past nine months have been a whirlwind of activity.
And as we look ahead, F5 remains committed to build on this strong foundation. Whether it’s introducing new developer-focused features, expanding centralized management capabilities, or finding innovative ways to strengthen application security, NGINX One is ready to support platform teams as they tackle the challenges of modern AI powered applications.
With so many feature updates to highlight, we encourage you to review our release notes for the full details.
And if you haven’t yet, review our newest eBook on managing and optimizing modern apps. Or, contact us to explore how NGINX One can deliver critical workloads, simplify operations, and secure your environments.