The Future of NGINX: Getting Back to Our Open Source Roots

Time flies when you’re having fun. So it’s hard to believe that NGINX is now 18 years old. Looking back, the community and company have accomplished a lot together. We recently hit a huge milestone – as of this writing 55.6% of all websites are powered by NGINX (either by our own software or by products built atop NGINX). We are also the number one web server by market share. We are very proud of that and grateful that you, the NGINX community, have given us this resounding vote of confidence.

We also recognize, more and more, that open source software continues to change the world. A larger and larger percentage of applications are built using open source code. From Bloomberg terminals and news to the Washington Post to Slack to Airbnb to Instagram and Spotify, thousands of the world’s most recognizable brands and properties rely on NGINX Open Source to power their websites. In my own life – between Zoom for work meetings and Netflix at night – I probably spend 80% of my day using applications built atop NGINX.

NGINX is only one element in the success story of open source. We would not be able to build the digital world – and increasingly, to control and manage the physical world – without all the amazing open source projects, from Kubernetes and containers to Python and PyTorch, from WordPress to Postgres to Node.js. Open source has changed the way we work. There are more than 73 million developers on GitHub who have collectively merged more than 170 million pull requests (PRs). A huge percentage of those PRs have been on code repositories with open source licenses.

We are thrilled that NGINX has played such a fundamental role in the rise and success of open source – and we intend to both keep it going and pay it forward. At the same time, we need to reflect on our open source work and adapt to the ongoing evolution of the movement. Business models for companies profiting from open source have become controversial at times. This is why NGINX has always tried to be super clear about what is open source and what is commercial. Above all, this meant never, ever trying to charge for functionality or capabilities that we had included in the open source versions of our software.

Open Source is Evolving Fast. NGINX Is Evolving, Too.

We now realize that we need to think hard about our commitment to open source, provide more value and capabilities in our open source products, and, yes, up our game in the commercial realm as well. We can’t simply keep charging for the same things as in the past, because the world has changed – some features included only in our commercial products are now table stakes for open source developers. We also know that open source security is top of mind for developers. For that reason, our open source projects need to be just as secure as our commercial products.

We also have to acknowledge reality. Internally, we have had a habit of saying that open source was not really production‑ready because it lacked features or scalability. The world has been proving us wrong on that count for some time now: many thousands of organizations are running NGINX open source software in production environments. And that’s a good thing, because it shows how much they believe in our open source versions. We can build on that.

In fact, we are doing that constantly with our core products. To those who say that the original NGINX family of products has grown long of tooth, I say you have not been watching us closely:

• For the core NGINX Open Source software, we continue to add new features and functionality and to support more operating system platforms. Two critical capabilities for security and scalability of web applications and traffic, HTTP3 and QUIC, are coming in the next version we ship.
• A quiet but incredibly innovative corner of the NGINX universe is NGINX JavaScript (njs), which enables developers to integrate JavaScript code into the event‑processing model of the NGINX HTTP and TCP/UDP (Stream) modules and extend NGINX configuration syntax to implement sophisticated capabilities. Our users have done some pretty amazing things, everything from innovative cache purging and header manipulations to support for more advanced protocols like MQTTv5.
• Our universal web application server, NGINX Unit, was conceived by the original author of NGINX Open Source, Igor Sysoev, and it continues to evolve. Unit occupies an important place in our vision for modern applications and a modern application stack that goes well beyond our primary focus on the data plane and security. As we develop Unit, we are rethinking how applications should be architected for the evolving Web, with more capabilities that are cloud‑native and designed for distributed and highly dynamic apps.

The Modern Apps Reference Architecture

We want to continue experimenting and pushing forward on ways to help our core developer constituency more efficiently and easily deploy modern applications. Last year at Sprint 2.0 we announced the NGINX Modern Apps Reference Architecture (MARA), and I am happy to say it recently went into general availability as version 1.0.0. MARA is a curated and opinionated stack of tools, including Kubernetes, that we have wired together to make it easy to deploy infrastructure and application architecture as code. With a few clicks, you can configure and deploy a MARA reference architecture that is integrated with everything you need to create a production‑grade, cloud‑native environment – security, logging, networking, application server, configuration and YAML management, and more.

MARA is a modular architecture, and by design. You can choose your own adventure and design from the existing modules a customized reference architecture that can actually run applications. The community has supported our idea and we have partnered with a number of innovative technology companies on MARA. Sumo Logic has added their logging chops to MARA and Pulumi has contributed modules for automation and workflow orchestration. Our hope is that, with MARA, any developer can get a full Kubernetes environment up and running in a matter of minutes, complete with all the supporting pieces, secure, and ready for app deployment. This is just one example of how I think we can all put our collective energy into advancing a big initiative in the industry.

The Future of NGINX: Modernize, Optimize, Extend

Each year at NGINX Sprint, our virtual user conference, we make new commitments for the coming year. This year is no different. Our promises for the next twelve months can be captured in three words: modernize, optimize, and extend. We intend to make sure these are not just business buzzwords; we have substantial programs for each one and we want you to hold us to our promises.

Promise #1: Modernize Our Approach, Presence, and Community Management

Obviously, we are rapidly modernizing our code and introducing new products and projects. But modernization is not just about code – it encompasses code management, transparency around decision making, and how we show up in the community. While historically the NGINX Open Source code base has run on the Mercurial version control system, we recognize that the open source world now lives on GitHub. Going forward, all NGINX projects will be born and hosted on GitHub because that’s where the developer and open source communities work.

We also are going to modernize how we govern and manage NGINX projects. We pledge to be more open to contributions, more transparent in our stewardship, and more approachable to the community. We will follow all expected conventions for modern open source work and will be rebuilding our GitHub presence, adding Codes of Conduct to all our projects, and paying close attention to community feedback. As part of this commitment to modernize, we are adding an NGINX Community channel on Slack. We will staff the channel with our own experts to answer your questions. And you, the community, will be there to help each other, as well – in the messaging tool you already use for your day jobs.

Promise #2: Optimize Our Developer Experience

Developers are our primary users. They build and create the applications that have made us who we are. Our tenet has always been that NGINX is easy to use. And that’s basically true – NGINX does not take days to install, spin up, and configure. That said, we can do better. We can accelerate the “time to value” that developers experience on our products by making the learning curve shorter and the configuration process easier. By “value” I mean deploying code that does something truly valuable, in production, full stop. We are going to revamp our developer experience by streamlining the installation experience, improving our documentation, and adding coverage and heft to our community forums.

We are also going to release a new SaaS offering that natively integrates with NGINX Open Source and will help you make it useful and valuable in seconds. There will be no registration, no gate, no paywall. This SaaS will be free to use, forever.

In addition, we recognize that many critical features which developers now view as table stakes are on the wrong side of the paywall for NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus. For example, DNS service discovery is essential for modern apps. Our promise is to make those critical features free by adding them to NGINX Open Source. We haven’t yet decided on all of the features to move and we want your input. Tell us how to optimize your experience as developers. We are listening.

Promise #3: Extend the Power and Capabilities of NGINX

As popular as NGINX is today, we know we need to keep improving if we want to be just as relevant ten years from now. Our ambitious goal is this: we want to create a full stack of NGINX applications and supporting capabilities for managing and operating modern applications at scale.

To date, NGINX has mostly been used as a Layer 7 data plane. But developers have to put up a lot of scaffolding around NGINX to make it work. You have to wire up automation and CI/CD capabilities, set up proper logging, add authentication and certificate management, and more. We want to make a much better extension of NGINX where every major requirement to test and deploy an app is satisfied by one or more high‑quality open source components that seamlessly integrate with NGINX. In short, we want to provide value at every layer of the stack and make it free. For example, if you are using NGINX Open Source or NGINX Plus as an API gateway, we want to make sure you have everything you need to manage and scale that use case – API import, service discovery, firewall, policy rules and security – all available as high‑quality open source options.

To summarize, our dream is to build an ecosystem around NGINX that extends into every facet of application management and deployment. MARA is the first step in building that ecosystem and we want to continue to attract partners. My goal is to see, by the end of 2022, an entire pre‑wired app launch and run in minutes in an NGINX environment, instrumented with a full complement of capabilities – distributed tracing, logging, autoscaling, security, CI/CD hooks – that are all ready to do their jobs.

Introducing Kubernetes API Gateway, a Brand New Amplify, and NGINX Agent

We are committed to all this. And here are three down payments on my three promises.

1. Earlier this year we launched NGINX Kubernetes Gateway<.htmla>, based on the Kubernetes API Gateway SIG’s reference architecture. This modernizes our product family and keeps us in line with the ongoing evolution of cloud native. The NGINX Kubernetes Gateway is also something of an olive branch we’re extending to the community. We realize it complicated matters when we created both a commercial and an open source Ingress controller for Kubernetes, both different from the community Ingress solution (also built on NGINX). The range of choices confused the community and put us in a bad position.

   It’s pretty clear that the Gateway API is going to take the place of the Ingress controller in the Kubernetes architecture. So we are changing our approach and will make the NGINX Kubernetes Gateway – which will be offered only as an open source product – the focal point of our Kubernetes networking efforts (in lockstep with the evolving standard). It will both integrate and extend into other NGINX products and optimize the developer experience on Kubernetes.

2. A few years back, we launched NGINX Amplify, a monitoring and telemetry SaaS offering for NGINX fleets. We didn’t really publicize it much. But thousands of developers found it and are still using it today. Amplify was and remains free. As part of our modernization pledge, we are adding a raft of new capabilities to Amplify. We aim to make it your trusted co‑pilot for standing up, watching over, and managing NGINX products at scale in real time. Amplify will not only monitor your NGINX instances but will help you configure, apply scripts to, and troubleshoot NGINX deployments.
3. We are launching NGINX Agent, a lightweight app that you deploy alongside NGINX Open Source instances. It will include features previously offered only in commercial products, for example the dynamic configuration API. With NGINX Agent, you’ll be able to use NGINX Open Source in many more use cases and with far greater flexibility. It will also include far more granular controls which you can use to extend your applications and infrastructure. Agent helps you make smarter decisions about managing, deploying, and configuring NGINX. We’re working hard on NGINX Agent – keep an eye out for a blog coming in the next couple months to announce its availability!

Looking Ahead

In a year, I hope you ask me about these promises. If I can’t report real progress on all three, then hold me to it, please. And please understand – we are engaged and ready to talk with all of you. You are our best product roadmap. Please take our annual survey. Join NGINX Community Slack and tell us what you think. Comment and file PRs on the projects at our GitHub repo.

It’s going to be a great year, the best ever. We look forward to hearing more from you and please count on hearing more from us. Help us help you. It’s going to be a great year, the best ever. We look forward to hearing more from you and please count on hearing more from us.