NGINX One: A SaaS Solution for Modern Application Management and Delivery

NGINX One will soon be available “as-a-service,” with a single license and a unified management console for enterprise-wide security, availability, observability, and scalability—with a friendly pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Today at AppWorld, we are introducing and opening “early access” for NGINX One: a global SaaS offering for deploying, securing, monitoring, scaling, and managing all NGINX instances (whether they are on-prem, in the cloud, or at the edge), and all from a single management interface. It includes support for all our data plane components—NGINX Plus, NGINX Open Source, NGINX Unit, NGINX Gateway Fabric, and Kubernetes Ingress Controller—under a single enterprise license.

Breaking down silos, making NGINX easier for all

Unlike previous NGINX pricing models, NGINX One is completely consumption-based—you only pay for what you use. For every organization from startups to global enterprises, NGINX One makes deploying any NGINX use case simpler, faster, more secure, more scalable, easier to observe and monitor, and more cost effective.

Moreover, we are unifying our management plane into a more cohesive package on the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform, as enterprises have come to expect. This benefits not only traditional NGINX users in application development and DevOps roles, but also the broader community of F5 customers with other responsibilities, most of whom have NGINX deployed somewhere in their organizations. CIOs, CISOs, and their teams—network operations, security operations, and infrastructure—frequently share overlapping responsibilities for enterprise application delivery and security.

On the Distributed Cloud Platform, NGINX One users will benefit from many adjacent security and network capabilities that hybrid, multicloud enterprises are demanding. They can easily network across clouds with our multicloud network fabric without enduring complex integrations. They can configure granular security policies for specific teams and applications at a global level with less toil and fewer tickets. F5’s security portfolio shares a single WAF engine, commonly referred to as “OneWAF,” which allows organizations to migrate the same policies they were using in BIG-IP Advanced WAF to NGINX App Protect. And the Distributed Cloud Platform’s global network of points-of-presence can bring applications much closer to end users without having to bring in an additional content delivery network layer.

We envision NGINX One meeting our customers wherever they are, with a rich ecosystem of supported providers that can be used to seamlessly integrate existing systems, from automation to monitoring and beyond.

Figure 1: NGINX One unites NGINX’s data plane components, a SaaS management console hosted on F5 Distributed Cloud, and pay-as-you-go pricing into a single product offer.

(F5 + NGINX) * SaaS = Better together

F5 and NGINX are truly better together. And bringing our capabilities together will make life easier for everyone, particularly our customers. NetOps and SecOps teams can shift multicloud deployment left to app dev teams without sacrificing security or control. Developers and DevOps teams can more easily experiment and innovate, building and deploying apps more quickly. Best of all, DevOps and platform ops teams, NetOps, and SecOps can better collaborate by utilizing the same set of tools for security, observability, and scalability.

As a SaaS, NGINX One enables our product team to accelerate innovation and feature development. And we can safely and easily make NGINX more extensible, allowing our users to seamlessly integrate NGINX with all their developer tools, CI/CD workflows, and other infrastructure and application delivery systems.

When we brought NGINX into the F5 fold almost five years ago, we had a vision—a single management plane for cloud applications spanning all environments and numerous use cases. We saw a unified system that made it possible for everyone responsible for and dependent on NGINX to use it more easily, securely, and efficiently. It has taken a while. NGINX One is the giant leap on that journey.

Sign up for access and tell us what you think

Today at AppWorld, we are beginning an early access phase with a select group of customers. We are initially inviting existing NGINX customers to participate in these early phases for feedback. As soon as we can, we’ll expand access to more F5 customers and move to general availability later in 2024. Interested NGINX customers can connect with us here and we’ll be in touch soon. We’ll be onboarding additional customers throughout the next several months, and we expect a waiting list to develop.

I want to thank both our NGINX and F5 communities for being so generous with their feedback and time in helping us shape NGINX One. Our work as product builders is principally driven to reflect your needs and wisdom. We hope that you will continue to provide input and guide the future development of NGINX One. We are listening and more excited than ever. Thanks again.

June 2024 Update: Since launch, NGINX One has added many new capabilities, and the delivery of a consumption-based pricing model has been deferred. Read this blog post for all the details on new features and pricing updates.