Getting Your Time Back with NGINX Unit

NGINX Sprint, our annual (and yes, virtual!) event is almost here. This year’s oceanic theme is Deep Dive into the World of NGINX, and August 23 through 25 NGINX sails home to its open source roots. Our destination? To show you how NGINX open source innovations help bring our vision for modern applications to life, in collaboration with CNCF contributors and projects like Grafana Labs and OpenTelemetry.

The modern application landscape is expansive, and in thought‑provoking demos and talks our Sprint experts will make sure you don’t get lost at sea. For example, renowned developer advocate and Principal Engineer at Google, Kelsey Hightower, takes the helm at the end of Day 2 to show Sprint attendees how to use NGINX Unit – our open source, universal web application server, reverse proxy, and static file server – to its full, time‑saving potential.

A Journey Through NGINX and Open Source with Kelsey Hightower airs August 24 at 9:10 AM PDT on the NGINX Sprint platform.

We really hope you’ll register and attend Sprint (it’s completely free), so we’re not going to give too much away about Kelsey’s session. But read on for a sneak peek.

NGINX Unit Lets You Write Less Code

When it comes to application servers, Kelsey’s #1 goal is save time. The less code you have to write to deploy your app, the better. In his Sprint demo, Kelsey keeps it simple. With a basic application inside a single container, he shows just how much time you can get back when deploying NGINX Unit as a web application server.

Kelsey gets NGINX Unit to run on Cloud Run, serving multiple Go applications and static files from a single container image – and many things happen simultaneously in the background. For example, he doesn’t write any code for logging but logs still emerge for free, with NGINX Unit as the web application server doing the heavy lifting.

Kelsey steers away from complexity and discusses how NGINX Unit checks all the boxes by:

• Running multiple binaries in the background
• Proxying using a lower‑level protocol
• Sending data to the application
• Returning the response to the requester

Kelsey also offers critiques on ways that NGINX Unit can improve. We appreciate that, because our aim is to continuously refine and enhance our open source offerings.

Our Community Comes First

When F5 acquired NGINX, we made a promise to stay committed to open source. This included increasing our investments in developing NGINX open source projects. Today, we’re still committed to keeping that promise.

In a chat with NGINX Product Group VP and GM Rob Whiteley during the session, Kelsey admits he was initially skeptical about NGINX keeping our word about open source. However, once he played around with NGINX Unit, he saw NGINX does in fact innovate – rather than copying and pasting what’s already out there – while staying continuously aware of the patterns open source communities crave.

Just as we value Kelsey’s opinion, we also want your thoughts and feedback. NGINX is committed both to listening to our community and to investing in a better world. For every post‑event survey filled out during Sprint, we will donate to The Ocean Cleanup, a non‑profit organization developing advanced technologies to rid the oceans of plastic – their goal is to remove 90% over time!

Dive into NGINX Open Source

There’s still time to gear up for NGINX Sprint, which takes place August 23–25 and is packed with educational discussions, demos, and self‑paced labs. Dive on in and register today for free – the water’s fine!

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